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The Inheritance of Loss

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2006 Man Booker Prize
 
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace from a world he has found too messy for justice. Then his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. It's the judge’s cook who watches over the young girl distractedly, for the judge's thoughts are claimed by his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS on an elusive search for a green card.
 
Later, an Indian-Nepali insurgency in the mountains interrupts Sai’s romance with her Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, and they are forced to confront their colliding interests. As the nation fights itself, the cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. And the judge must revisit his past and his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires.
 
In a generous vision, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, Desai presents the human quandaries facing a panoply of characters. This majestic novel of a busy, grasping time illuminates the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts of religion, race, and nationalism.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 24, 2005
      This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
      ) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty. Agent, Michael Carlisle.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This exceptional book is read with such wisdom and ability that the narrative becomes an epic poem that fills the listener's senses with the sounds, the smells, and the most minute details of India. High in the Himalayas lives the Judge with his granddaughter, his cook, and his dog, Mutt. The story of their lives and the lives of all around them, both past and present, creates a tapestry of delight and despair. Whether she is speaking as a Nepalese agitator, a refined, retired gentlewoman, a New York drunk, or an Indian girl who only speaks English, Meera Simhan's precision of accent, emotion, and timing adds to the perfection that is this novel. The language is so lush and the plot so engrossing that the listener will be thinking about different moments in the novel for months after hearing it. B.H.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

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