Description

In a damp, decaying house called Cho Oyu, set on the slopes above Kalimpong in the foothills of the Himalayas, a retired Cambridge-educated judge lives with his orphaned teenage granddaughter Sai, his beloved red setter Mutt, and an elderly cook whose son Biju is illegally washing dishes in the basement kitchens of New York.

It is 1986. The Gorkhaland agitation is beginning. Boys with old rifles are coming down the mountain.

Across one of the most beautifully written Indian novels of the last twenty years, Kiran Desai weaves the story of a single household — Sai’s tentative first love with her young Nepali maths tutor, the cook’s quiet pride in his far-off son, the old judge’s buried colonial shame — into a vast, tender meditation on what it means to inherit a history one did not choose. The legacy of Empire. The cost of leaving. The longer cost of staying. The illegal kitchens of New York where the children of poor Indian fathers wait for green cards that will never come.

Lush, melancholy, and gorgeously observed, *The Inheritance of Loss* is a Himalayan novel that travels from Kalimpong to Queens and back, and that finally suggests the only thing we ever truly inherit is the question of where to call home.

Winner of the Booker Prize. A modern Indian masterpiece.