Kiran Desai has won the Booker for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. The Guardian’s coverage has lots of interesting details. At 37 (or perhaps 35, according to the Booker site), Desai is the youngest woman to win the prize. Her mother, Anita Desai, a novelist to whom Kiran’s book was dedicated, has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. With all the new talent in this year’s shortlist the Guardian also wonders “The question left by the contest is whether new talent is in danger of being overmarketed and overexposed too soon.”
An excerpt from the book’s opening is available for the curious. It begins:
All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Related: The shortlist and excerpts and the longlist.
