Born in India , Desai has family ties to the Man Booker Prize. Her mother Anita Desai was shortlisted three times but has never won.
Set both in the northeastern Himalayas and New York City , The Inheritance of Loss follows the tensions between an old anglophile judge and his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, as well as the trials of Biju, the son of the judge's cook, as he tries to evade U.S. immigration services.
Desai was born in India in 1971, and was educated in India , in England , and the U.S. She studied creative writing at Columbia University and is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Anchor).
The Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded to the best full-length novel written in English by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland .
