The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [1]
‘The book’s magic lies in [its] rich images’ Entertainment Weekly
‘A brilliant talent. Creating gorgeous pictures in the mind, Desai generously embellishes on colours, fragrances and evocative landscapes’ Asiana
‘Exquisite. Kiran Desai meets the complexity of our times with a language that is supple in its syntax and its rhythms. The story she tells is filled with patiently acquired insights about humanity, and every other page is a hymn to nature’s abundance’ Nadeem Aslam
‘A remarkable book, funny and insightful – a showcase for the amazing range and depth of Kiran Desai’s writing’ Manil Suri
‘The Inheritance of Loss, so moving, funny, unflinching, is the best novel I’ve yet read about the contemporary immigrant life and the on-going parallel world “left behind.” And the writing is extraordinary: astonishingly observant and inventive, joyously alive. Really, it’s just the best, sweetest, most delightful new novel I’ve read in ages!’ Francisco Goldman, author of The Divine Husband
‘If God is in the details, Ms. Desai has written a holy book. Page after page, from Harlem to the Himalayas, she captures the terror and exhilaration of being alive in this world’ Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
‘The Inheritance of Loss is a revelation in the possibilities of the novel. It is vast in scope, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the immigrant quarters of New York; the gripping stories of people buffeted by the winds of history, personal
and political. Kiran Desai’s voice is fiercely funny – a humour born out of darkness, the laughter of the dispossessed. It is a remarkable novel because it is rich in that most elusive quality in fiction: wisdom’ Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
PENGUIN BOOKS
To my mother with so much love
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Atlantic Monthly Press,
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 2006
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2007
8
Copyright © Kiran Desai, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
“The Boast of Quietness,” translated by Stephen Kessler, copyright © 1999 by
Maria Kodama: translation © 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems
by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Used by permission of
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192573-8
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable