19 years on, Kiran Desai has a 2nd shot at Booker | India News

Nineteen years after winning the Man Booker, Kiran Desai, 53, has returned to the award longlist with a novel about two Indians navigating life in the US. The Indian American author, who became the prize’s youngest-ever winner in 2006 with her second novel ‘The Inheritance of Loss’, is now among 13 writers vying for the literary trophy.Her mother Anita Desai – with whom she shares an inheritance, not of loss but of fine storytelling – has been shortlisted for the Booker thrice but never won. After her win, Kiran acknowledged the debt: “I wrote this book so much in my mother’s company that it feels almost like her book.’ While the two craft very different literary landscapes, they do have many things in common, including the habit of escaping to Mexican villages to write. The 88-year-old Anita’s last novella ‘Rosarita’, which released last year, was also set in Mexico.Kiran’s longlisted ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ which will be out in Sept, has taken almost two decades to take shape. By her own admission, she writes slowly, piecing her novels together like a jigsaw puzzle. Going by the promos, the storyline seems almost filmi: a love story about two young people who first see each other on a train. But, as always, she remains conscious of her role in the wider world, exploring themes like migration, modernity, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.“Intimate in its details, epic in its reach,” is how Manasi Subramaniam, editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House India, describes it. “While it is about the weight of familial love, the violence of class and the ache of displacement, it is sharp, funny, tragic and endlessly surprising,” says Subramaniam.