Title
Home in the World: A Memoir
Author: Amartya Sen
Genre: Autobiography
Publisher: Allen Lane
Cost: Rs 899

Amartya Sen’s memoir takes the reader through his life before he became a Nobel Prize-winning economist, renowned across the world. It documents his troubled early years riddled with a surprise diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer, and his battles to maintain sanity in the face of doom and snatched youth. That is later replaced with astute observation of the life of an immigrant student and the journey to find purpose in life.

The book talks about his childhood experiences in Bengal during the devastating famine of 1943, and the impact that events such as that one and the Independence struggle had on his formative years. His focus on exploitation and poverty emerges during his early years in Bengal, and more so during his time as a student in Cambridge.