"A FINE BALANCE moves from villages to cities, and returns the reader, a little wiser and a good deal sadder, to the villages again at the end....The style is detached, humorous, and symbolic. But it is hard to take comfort in Mr Mistry's magnificent novel, despite its generosity: it is too true." - (Economist, 4/20/96)
"It is a measure of Mistry's skill as a storyteller that the cameo appearances of minor characters are often as gripping as the tales of the central characters: the 'Beggarmaster' who has an odd compassion for his charges, despite his willingness to mutilate them to make them more effective mendicants; the hair-collector who becomes a fortunetelling 'godman'; and the rent collector whose conscience troubles him despite his willingness to carry out the landlord's orders....In A FINE BALANCE, [Mistry] paints an affectionate but unsparing picture of an India where human life and limbs are cheap. - David W. K. Kay (Washington Post Book World, 4/21/96)
"It is impossible not to seethe at the injustices of the police state, and impossible not to take these characters passionately to heart: this is a novel that can stand with the best of Dickens." - (New Yorker, 6/3/96)
"This is a work of genius. I cannot begin to review it without saying so. It should be read by everyone who loves books, win every prize, make its author a millionaire, and displace once and for all the idea that MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN is a good book about India. Only in fairy tales is such virtue rewarded, and given that Rohinton Mistry wrote SUCH A LONG JOURNEY and saw the 1991 Booker go to Ben Okri, I don't expect justice this time either. But A FINE BALANCE is THE India novel, the novel readers have been waiting for ever since E. M. Forster and J. G. Farrell first attempted to render that vas - Jenny Lind Nilsson (Literary Review, 3/1/96)
"Those who continue to harp on the inevitable decline of the novel ought to hold off for a while. The unique task of the genre, after all, is truthfulness to human experience in all its variety, and thanks to the great migrations of population in our time, human variety is to be found in replenished abundance all around us....Consider Rohinton Mistry....Rhoninton Mistry needs no infusions of magical realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is quite magical enough." - Juliette Wolf (New York Times Book Review, 6/23/96)
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