Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is headed to the small screen, Variety reports.
HBO is adapting Mistry’s novel as a limited series with the production companies Blueprint Pictures and Northwood Entertainment. The series will be written and directed by Ritesh Batra, whose 2013 box-office hit, The Lunchbox, was nominated for a BAFTA Award.
Mistry’s novel, first published in Canada in 1995 and in the U.S. in 1996, follows four Indians whose lives intersect during the national emergency called by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “a sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams.”
The novel is one of the most celebrated Canadian novels of the 1990s. It won the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious fiction award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected the novel as a pick for her book club. In an interview posted on Oprah.com, Mistry said, “Perhaps my main intention in writing this novel was to look at history from the bottom up, from the point of view of people like Ishvar and Om. The dispossessed. The hungry. The homeless. [I wanted to] see what it meant to them to live during this time of The Emergency [from 1975 to 1977].”
Filming on the series is scheduled to begin this spring.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
