The Inheritance of Loss

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 Loss heralds 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.

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and 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.