The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss is a novel by the Indian writer Kiran Desai, published in 2006 and written over seven years.

The book alternates between the judge's household in Kalimpong and Biju's life in the United States, and the two halves are asked to comment on each other: an old man who spent his career serving a colonial system and now resents everyone, a granddaughter raised to be English in a country where that is a proposition rather than a fact, a cook whose loyalty is a business arrangement and whose son is washing dishes in New York restaurants for an employer who pays him less than the law allows. Around them Desai puts the Gorkhaland agitation, which turns neighbours into factions and gives the novel its violence, and a dog called Mutt, who matters more to the judge than any of the people. Her earlier novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, had been well received, and this book won the Booker Prize for 2006, the National Book Critics Circle fiction award in 2007 and the Vodafone Crossword Book Award.