A Cross-Cultural Saga Wins the Booker Prize

A Cross-Cultural Saga Wins the Booker Prize
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Oct. 10 — The novelist Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for “The Inheritance of Loss,” a novel that examines identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.

At 35, Ms. Desai is the youngest woman ever to win the Booker, Britain’s best-known literary award. The prize, awarded annually to a novelist from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country, comes with a check for £50,000, or about $93,000, and a guaranteed increase in visibility and sales.

This year’s roster of six finalists was considered surprising because the Booker judges, led by the writer Hermione Lee, chose relative unknowns from a list of 112 books over authors like Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer and Barry Unsworth. But in a speech at the Booker Prize ceremony at the Guildhall in London’s business district, Ms. Lee said the judges had merely selected “the six we were most passionate about.”

She called Ms. Desai’s book “a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.”

“The Inheritance of Loss,” published by Grove Press in the United States, is set in a remote corner of India against the backdrop of growing Nepalese unrest, and in the streets of Manhattan, where illegal immigrants try to make a living while eluding the authorities. It is Ms. Desai’s second book and concerns itself with what she calls “the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner.”

Ms. Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been a Booker finalist three times, but has not won. They are the first mother-daughter team of nominees in the prize’s 37-year history.

Accepting the award, Kiran Desai said she owed a great deal to her mother, to whom “The Inheritance of Loss” is dedicated, not least because she had written much of the book at her mother’s house. “She’s a very sweet mother, and a very kind mother,” Ms. Desai said. “I owe her such an enormous debt that I can’t express it in any ordinary way.”

The five runners-up each receive £2,500. Other authors on the shortlist of finalists who also wrote about immigration and exile this year included Hisham Matar, whose novel “In the Country of Men” tells the story of a 9-year-old boy grappling with the violence and secrets of Libya in 1979; and Kate Grenville, whose book “The Secret River” describes a British convict’s journey to a new life in Australia in the 19th century.

Also on the shortlist were Edward St. Aubyn for “Mother’s Milk,” a tragicomic novel about addiction and the struggles of raising children in an aristocratic British family fallen on hard times; M. J. Hyland for “Carry Me Down,” whose protagonist is a boy in 1970’s Ireland who believes he has an uncanny gift of intuiting truthfulness; and Sarah Waters for “The Night Watch,” which follows the entwined lives of four Londoners during and after the Blitz.