Lannan Visiting Lecturer Tope Folarin’s Article on Megha Majumdar’s Second Novel

A picture of a red coin with the outline of the world map on it. The background is a red-orange gradient.

The intimate struggles of immigration and scarcity caused by climate change were the central topics of Tope Folarin’s new article on A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar’s second novel which was recently released on October 14th, 2025.

Folarin’s article, published by The Atlantic on November 8th, 2025, explored the high stakes of the setting of Majumdar’s novel in environment-ravaged 21st century India: “…A Guardian and a Thief unfolds as a mesmerizing morality play that demonstrates how categories like “victim” and “thief” collapse under conditions of scarcity. Yet the novel suffers from what feels like a mismatch between the conditions it depicts and the worldview of the people who populate it. Majumdar’s characters are contending with intractable 21st-century problems while adhering to the stories of an earlier era. In a novel that is so alert to where climate change is leading the world, a narrative frame that illustrates migration as linear and largely redemptive feels anachronistic.”

Tope Folarin is the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing.