In Megha Majumdar’s “A Burning,” a terrorist event transforms three lives—and the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture.

“The book’s surface realism—that great boon to writers—is abundant and busy and life-sown: muri wallas, pillow-fillers, guava sellers, a man who grinds tobacco in his palm, not to mention theatrical agents, schoolteachers, hijras, criminals, and criminal politicians. But the system that at once supports and undermines this diverse vitality is seen with an unrelentingly cold authorial eye, in all its small and large corruption, its frozen inequality, murderous racism, political opportunism, and unalleviated poverty.”

Read more in The New Yorker.