Winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary novel of love and loss, now reissued with a new introduction by the author
Published to astonishing acclaim,The Inheritance of Lossheralds Kiran Desai as one of our most insightful novelists. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered judge wants only to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, but his thoughts are usually on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. As her characters’ lives overlap and intertwine, Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel illuminates a story of joy and despair, as well as the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism.
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Kiran Desaiwas born in India in 1971. She is the author of the critically acclaimed
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchardand the Man Booker Prize winning novel
The Inheritance of Loss. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Praise forThe Inheritance of Loss:
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award
“Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence . . . Desai’s novel seems lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender . . . Desai’s prose has uncanny flexibility and poise . . . Marvel at Desai’s artistic power.”—Pankaj Mishra,New York Times Book Review(front page review)
“It’s a clash of civilizations, even empires . . . The idea of an old empire, the British l)