The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Hamish Hamilton, HK$195 Published in August Odds 6/1 Imagine a life without past or future. Kiran Desai, 35, alternates chapters between a town in the blurry Indian part of the Himalayas, and the humiliations meted out by Nepalese revolutionaries, and New York, where humiliation of a different kind is the lot of illegal restaurant workers. The central characters are Sai, who lives with her grandfather, a retired judge unable to reconcile with the early rejection of his aspirations for Englishness, and Biju, the son of their cook, who is often asked by fellow illegal Indian immigrants why he is in the US. Sai's love for her maths tutor, Gyan, seduced away by a political cause promising a better future, underscores the fury of the humiliated whose pasts were mandated by history. The Himalayas are vivid, the onset of the monsoon superb, and her exploration of the rat-infested Manhattan slums inhabited by the illegal immigrants who work in New York unsettling. This has been called 'an unrelentingly bitter view' of a world heedless to personal notions of dignity and justice. Desai takes the reader on a journey in uncomfortable shoes. 'I wanted to write about what happens when you take people from a poor country and place them in a wealthy one. How does the imbalance between these two worlds change a person's thinking and feeling?' - Kiran Desai
