The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai

Mar 2024 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Meera Simhan

About this audiobook

Kiran Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country's place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself. The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires-every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal. A novel of depth and emotion, Desai's second, long-awaited novel fulfills the grand promise established by her first.

About the author

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971 and educated in India, England, and the United States. She studied creative writing at Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Woolrich Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Salman Rushdie's anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing. In 2006 Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.

Meera Simhan was born in England and raised in Southern California and India. After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Meera has been working in television and film in England and the United States both as an actress and a writer. In the U.S., Meera’s television credits include recurring and guest-starring roles in such shows as The Resident, EVIL, The Flash, New Girl, House, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Her film credits include Four Samosas, which recently premiered at the Tribeca film festival, Definition Please, Miss India America, and Hello I Must Be Going. She has performed in theater at The Taper Too, The Pacific Playwrights Festival, and at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Meera co-wrote the feature, Miss India America, which is currently streaming on HULU. Meera is a Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE) fellow.