When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, few critics would have bet on Desai’s novel scooping the prize. Such prudence is understandable, however, for this is one of those disarmingly simple books that is all too easy to underestimate. It is almost Virginia Woolf-like in the way that not a great deal takes place yet everything happens, silence speaks volumes and small events have huge reverberations. The story opens during the mid-1980s in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, home to a retired judge whose mouldering residence serves as a symbol of decayed colonialism. Billeted with him are his cook and Sai, his orphaned teenage granddaughter, whose romance with her Nepalese teacher is smothered by his emerging radicalism after he joins an insurgency fomented by his fellow countrymen. Broken dreams, blighted hopes and the messy collision between the personal and the political also occur in an adjacent narrative involving Biju, the cook’s son. Having escaped grinding poverty for a fresh start in America, Biju is sucked into a subterranean world of illegally employed immigrants who toil beneath New York’s restaurants. Desai is equally at ease with big ideas (dispossession, prejudice, the battle lines between the haves and have-nots where terrorism is seeded) as she is with wryly intimate character portraits, such as the judge’s Anglophile neighbours, clinging by their fingernails to the vestiges of empire by way of the BBC and M&S underwear. The novel has its longueurs, but is scored with intelligence, humanity and wit.

THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS by Kiran Desai

(Penguin £7.99). TL

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