The novelist Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss,” a novel that examines identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.
Desai spent seven years writing the novel. The loss in her title is chiefly the loss of faith in India felt among the legions that overstay tourist visas and become illegal immigrants in the US. Her story counterpoints the lives of an embittered old judge, a survivor of British colonial rule, with those of his loyal cook and the cook’s son, one of the immigrants who scrabble for subsistence on developing world pay in New York.
Desai has said in interviews that her title “speaks of little failures, passed down from generation to generation.
Announcing the long list of 19 books on August 14, Prof Lee said: “It’s a list in which famous established novelists rub shoulders with little known newcomers.”
On September 14, when the shortlist of six titles was published, it became evident that she and her fellow-judges had done something rare in the 38-year annals of Booker: they had dumped the famous writers and picked mainly little-known newcomers.
Picture Credit : Google
