IN BRIEF (Page 19)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo (Random House)

It may seem grotesquely inappropriate to recall Primo Levi's struggles for survival in a Nazi camp while thinking of the apparently self-reliant individualists of a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's airport - the setting of Katherine Boo's extraordinary first book, which describes a few months in the life of a young garbage trader, Abdul, and his friends and family.

After all, these plucky "slumdogs" may be - in at least one recent fantasy - India's next millionaires, part of the lucky 1 percent able to savor the five-star hotels that loom over Annawadi.