Fiction: Kiran Desai's ambitious second novel considers post-colonial India and its diaspora. Through close description of the lives of half a dozen "ordinary" people adjusting to change, she takes on larger issues, including globalisation and multiculturalism.
Though set in the mid-1980s, it is very much a novel for our times, confronting the massive economic inequality that divides east and west, and how this can give rise to fundamentalism and terrorist violence.
Kiran Desai, who was born in 1971, is the daughter of three-times Booker-shortlisted novelist Anita Desai and was educated in India, England and the United States. She is one of the post-Rushdie generation of Indians writing in English (although only 5 per cent of their compatriots can read the language), who include Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra and Jhumpa Lahiri and who prefer realism to magic realism.
The central character, Sai, a 17-year-old orphan, lives with her grandfather, a Cambridge graduate and retired judge, and his cook in a crumbling mansion in remote Kalimpong, in the Himalayas. The damp climate, with its the lush growth and rapid decay, is a constant presence.
Sai has been educated by English nuns and is sent to her grandfather at the age of eight, following the death of her parents. As the novel opens, Sai is in the midst of her first love affair, with her tutor, Gyan, a young Nepali from a family that traditionally enlisted in the Gurkha regiment of the British army.
The cook's son, Biju, has gone to New York on a tourist visa and is exploited in a succession of unhygienic kitchens. His story gives a glimpse of the kind of underworld inhabited by the US's poorest immigrants, as he manages to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
Kiran Desai is especially good on Anglophile Indians, who find themselves an anachronism in post-colonial India. Sai is befriended by elderly sisters Lola and Noni. Lola's daughter is a newsreader with the BBC and Lola lives for her biennial trip to London: "Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favoured with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud."
But even sentences as lively as this one are not enough to compensate for the slow pace of the novel, which staggers under the weight of half a dozen parallel stories. The judge's time in England has left him a misfit in both England and India, and he struggles to reconcile past aspirations and present reality, as do Noni and Lola and their neighbours on the hill, Mr Potty, an amiable alcoholic, and Father Booty, a dairy farmer who is deported after 45 years in India.
Gyan is caught up in the Gorkha (so-called in rejection of its Anglicised spelling) insurgency movement. His loyalty to his own people, and his new awareness of their extreme poverty, a result of colonial exploitation, make him despise his former sweetheart. He realises that it is "her lack of Indianness" that defines her status. Even the judge's dog, Mutt, a pampered Irish setter, has her own subplot.
The novel - now longlisted for this year's Man Booker prize - is memorable chiefly for its portrayal of the older generation of Anglophile Indians. The judge and his eccentric band of neighbours ring far more true than the younger characters, who seem to exist chiefly as mouthpieces for the author's own observations.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic
The Inheritance of Loss By Kiran Desai Hamish Hamilton, 324pp. £16.99