City of Joy

City of Joy is a 1985 novel by the French writer Dominique Lapierre, arguably the best-known work of his career. It is set in Anand Nagar, a slum in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, and follows several characters whose lives intersect in an environment of extreme poverty.

The central figure is Father Paul Lambert, a French Catholic priest (a Polish priest named Stephan Kovalski in the English-language edition) who chooses to live among the poorest people and share their hardships. The residents call him "Big Brother Paul". Alongside him unfolds the story of Hasari Pal, a peasant farmer who comes to the city with his family after a drought destroys the village where they had lived for generations. Hasari earns his living pulling a rickshaw, one of the carts that carry people through the city. In the second half of the book, the American doctor Max Loeb takes a larger role: a young physician who has just finished medical school and wants to do something meaningful before opening a practice for wealthy patients, and who is changed by the priest's work.

The novel moves through a succession of misfortunes: illness, extreme weather, the violence of organised crime, political pressure, and the weight of tradition and caste. Yet it also shows the everyday solidarity that arises in such extreme conditions, and this is its central idea: that love and mutual help can sustain human dignity even amid misery. The title comes from the name the residents themselves give their neighbourhood.

Lapierre maintained that the characters and many situations were grounded in real events, though the book is generally regarded as fiction, since many conversations and actions are reconstructed or invented. Part of the royalties goes to a foundation that supports children from the slum. The novel received the Christopher Award in 1986, and in 1992 Roland Joffé adapted it into a film starring Patrick Swayze. Calcutta came to be popularly nicknamed the "City of Joy" because of the book.