Home in the World

From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to bettering humanity.

A towering figure in the field of economics, Amartya Sen is perhaps best known for his work on poverty and famine, as inspired by events in his boyhood home of West Bengal, India. But Sen has, in fact, called many places “home,” from Dhaka in modern Bangladesh to Trinity College, Cambridge. In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and profoundly truthful vision of twentieth- and twenty-first century life. Interweaving scenes from his youth with candid reflections on wealth, welfare, and social justice, Sen shows how his life experiences—in Asia, Europe, and later America—vitally informed his work, culminating in the ultimate “portrait of a citizen of the world” (Philip Hensher, Spectator).

• “Sen is more than an economist, moral philosopher or even an academic. He is a life-long campaigner . . . for a more noble idea of home.” —Edward Luce, Financial Times (UK)
• “[Sen] is an unflinching man of science but also insistently humane.” —Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal