Home in the World

From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a long-awaited memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to betterment of humanity.

For Amartya Sen, “home” has been many places, including Dhaka, in modern Bangladesh, where he grew up; Calcutta, where he studied economics; and Cambridge, where he engaged with the greatest minds of the twentieth century. In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and truthful vision of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life.

With characteristic moral clarity, Sen reflects on cataclysmic events that tore his world asunder, from the Japanese assault on Burma and India to the Bengal famine of 1943, the struggle for Indian independence, and the outbreak of toxic nationalism that accompanied the end of British rule. Still, Sen—a tireless champion of the dispossessed—remains the fearless optimist, working now as ever to break down walls among warring ethnic groups. Both a book of penetrating ideas and people and places, Home in the World becomes a work of human empathy across distance and time, and of being at home in the world.

About the Author: 

Amartya Sen is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. A former master of Trinity College, Cambridge, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books include Development as Freedom and The Idea of Justice.