Kiran Desai

In a decaying house below Kanchenjunga near Kalimpong, a retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, lives with his cook, his dog Mutt, and his orphaned granddaughter Sai. The judge's own past unfolds: sent to Cambridge in the 1930s, humiliated by English racism, he returned contemptuous of everything Indian, including the wife he brutalised. Sai falls in love with her Nepali mathematics tutor Gyan, who is drawn into the Gorkhaland agitation of the mid-1980s and comes to despise her privilege. In a parallel strand, the cook's son Biju works illegally in a succession of New York basement kitchens, moving between restaurants and immigration fear, until he gives up and returns home — arriving robbed of everything he owns.

The novel sets two forms of dislocation against each other: the colonial-era Indian who went to England and was ruined by it, and the contemporary migrant whose America is a series of kitchen floors. That structure is the argument — that the promise of elsewhere has changed its shape without changing its cost. Desai's tone is comic and cruel at once, and her refusal to make Biju's return redemptive or Gyan's politics simply wrong is what critics praised and what made the book unpopular with some readers in the Darjeeling hills, who objected to its portrayal of the Gorkhaland movement. It is commonly read alongside Lahiri and Rushdie in discussions of diaspora, though its politics are considerably bleaker than either.