The Inheritance of Loss

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves together three storylines: a retired judge in Kalimpong, India, whose Western education alienated him from his own culture; his orphaned granddaughter Sai, who falls in love with her Nepali tutor; and the tutor's father, an illegal immigrant in New York. Desai writes with extraordinary intelligence about colonialism's psychic damage — how it destroys the ability to belong anywhere — and the insurgent violence in the Himalayas gives the novel its dramatic frame. A significant literary novel.