Kiran Desai and Her Fictional World  (English, Hardcover, Sharma Vijay K.)

India has been consistently producing award-winning authors or inspiring other writers to base their works on Indian colour, themes and identity. Kiran Desai has written an exquisite novel which won the prestigious Booker Award and found a place in the New York Times Most Notable Fiction list. This is a novel to be savored for its stunning prose, complex characters and finely captured sense of place. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, published in 1998, received widespread fame and praise. It won the Betty Task Award for the best new novel by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35. Published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries, eight years later, The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Booker Prize. The extraordinary achievement makes the 35 year old Desai the youngest woman ever to win the Booker, a distinction previously enjoyed by Arundhati Roy. A story of such depth and emotion, hilarity and imagination, Desai’s second, long-awaited novel fulfills the grand promise established by her first. This novel manages to explore just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Desai is now among a growing group of prominent young novelists of Indian background, including Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri. Kiran Desai and Her Fictional World is a collection of twenty-seven critical essays which treat Kiran Desai’s works with infinite interest, respect and sensitive understanding. The contributors to the volume have studied the novels of this celebrated writer from various angles. The anthology presents the background of Man Booker Prize and introduces Kiran Desai. Editors have presented this anthology in two sections, each dedicated to one of her novels. This volume will be useful to not only the students of Kiran Desai’s fiction, but also the common readers to understand Desai's fictional world better.