Why read The Inheritance of Loss?

Book cover of The Inheritance of Loss

Book description

The Inheritance of Loss is Kiran Desai's extraordinary Man Booker Prize winning novel.

High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time.

The judge, broken by a world too messy for justice, is haunted by his past. His orphan granddaughter has fallen…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Inheritance of Loss as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jonathan Lerner

Author

How people can bear the unbearable! And how interconnected people's disparate unbearable situations can be.

As in, growing up a mixed-ethnicity orphan in the care of your cold-as-a-fish grandfather, in an impoverished country sliding into dysfunction (and where young men are seduced into terrorism)...and, as in being one speck in the global cloud of migration, landing in New York, working crap kitchen jobs and bike delivery, sharing a crap apartment with too many other guys...

From Jonathan's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Norrin M. Ripsman

Author

There’s so much to love in this book. Desai’s characters come to life, as does Kalimpong's setting on the Himalayan foothills. You can feel the frustrations and humiliations of Sai, her grandfather, their cook, and his son Biju in New York City as the cruelty and callousness of life crush them.

As the book lurched toward its painful conclusion, I desperately warned the characters to avoid a catastrophe, but alas, to no avail. This is one of the best books I have ever read.

From Norrin's list on novels that nail the endings.