The Inheritance of Loss

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2006 "If book reviews just cut to the chase, this one would simply read: This is a terrific novel! Read it!" -Ann Harleman, "The Boston Globe" "One of the most impressive novels in English of the past year, and I predict you'll read it...with your heart in your chest, inside the narrative, and the narrative inside you." -Alan Cheuse, "Chicago Tribune" "[An] extraordinary new novel...lit by a moral intelligence at once fierce and tender." -Pankaj Mishra, front-cover review in "The New York Times Book Review" "If God is in the details, Ms. Desai has written a holy book. Page after page, from Harlem to the Himalayas, she captures the terror and exhilaration of being alive in the world." -Gary Shteyngart, author of "Absurdistan" "It's a clash of civilizations, even empires . . . The idea of an old empire, the British one collides against the nouveaux riche American one. The story ricochets between the two worlds, held together by Desai's sharp eyes and even sharper tongue. . . . This is a . . . substantial meal, taking on heavier issues of land and belonging, home and exile, poverty and privilege, and love and the longing for it." --Sandip Roy, "San Francisco Chronicle" (front page review) "Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory." --"The New Yorker" "Editor's Choice ... Kiran Desai writes beautifully about powerless people as they tangle with the modern world and in so doing she casts her own powerful spell." --Elizabeth Taylor, "Chicago Tribune" "An endearing view of globalisation . . . The Inheritance of Loss is a book about tradition and modernity, the past and the future-and about the surprising ways both amusing and sorrowful, in which they all connect. . . . A wide variety of readers should enjoy." --Boyd Tonkin, "The Independent" (London) "Impressive . . . a big novel