Katherine Boo spent three years reporting in Annawadi, a slum near Mumbai's international airport, to write this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction. She tells the story of families striving for better lives in conditions Americans can barely imagine: garbage recyclers who sort trash by hand, children who scavenge recyclables from airport dumpsters, residents who build shacks on land they don't own. Then a false accusation of assault upends everything, revealing how the justice system operates for those without money or connections. Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is married to an Indian development economist, writes with novelistic skill about real people facing impossible circumstances. She spent years gaining the trust of Annawadi residents, learning their language, and documenting their lives with meticulous care. The book raises uncomfortable questions about global inequality and the rhetoric of development, showing the distance between poverty-reduction statistics and the texture of poor people's actual lives. Boo neither romanticizes her subjects nor strips them of agency, instead showing how intelligence and determination play out in a system that offers little room for either. This is journalism as a form of witness, as moving as it is disturbing.