In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. A Guardian and a Thief follows Majumdar’s virtuosic debut, the political fiction A Burning. When he finds that the strange booklets have no practical use, he tosses them to the edge of a rubbish heap. Blackmail and a missing child are just two links in a chain that holds the antagonists together with terrible, classical force. Still, A Guardian and a Thief is an impressive novel.