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The Inheritance of Loss

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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.

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