The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
The Himalayas, an insurgency, and a cook's son in New York.
For you if
you want to understand how colonial education creates people who belong nowhere and want everything they were taught to want
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A retired judge in the Himalayan foothills, his orphaned granddaughter Sai, her tutor Gyan who joins the Gorkhaland insurgency, and the judge's cook whose son is an illegal immigrant in New York. Desai weaves between the Darjeeling of the 1980s and New York, between the insurgency that is tearing the community apart and the diaspora experience of someone who left and found only a different kind of poverty. Booker Prize winner. The dispatch from inside the specific experience of colonial education — the Indian who was taught to want England and found neither England nor India would have him.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- India • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Indian author
- Topics
- gorkhaland insurgency
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
