Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for this funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides.
By Kiran Desai
The Man Booker Prize 2006
Kiran Desai
A novel seven years in the writing made Kiran Desai both the then youngest winner of the prize and a daughter who went one better than her mother, Anita Desai, a three-time shortlistee.
Anita Desai left India at 14 for first England and then the United States where she studied creative writing. Fiction, however, was in her blood, with a celebrated novelist mother. As for The Inheritance of Loss, her second novel, ‘I wrote this book so much in my mother’s company,’ said the daughter, ‘it feels almost like her book.’
Desai’s career, however, is closer to that of another Indian winner, Arundhati Roy, in that she too has only written two novels.
Winner The Booker Prize 2006
- By
- Kiran Desai
- Published by
- Hamish Hamilton
Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for this funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides.
The Shortlist
Kate Grenville’s fictional account of the conflict that accompanied the settlement of New South Wales by exiled British convicts in the 19th century.
M.J. Hyland’s darkly funny and compelling novel about a 12-year-old boy whose obsession with the truth threatens disaster for his entire family.
By M.J. Hyland
Whispers and fears intensify around a young boy in Hisham Matar’s gripping depiction of childhood confronted with the effects of revolution.
By Hisham Matar
The malicious sequel to Edward St Aubyn’s 1990s trilogy, Some Hope, which introduced the upper-class Melrose family in all their decadent glory.
Sarah Waters’ engaging fiction about four Londoners whose lives and secrets during and after the Second World War connect in often startling ways.
By Sarah Waters
