Vol. 7, Issue 1, Part D (2025)

Desai's second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was inspired by her personal experiences following her departure from India. This work has been dedicated to her mother, Anita Desai. Desai received the Man Booker Prize for this work, becoming the youngest woman to receive this coveted prize at the age of thirty-five. The novel is situated in the northeastern Himalayas and New York. The tale centres on a Cambridge-educated Indian judge who spends his retirement in Kalimpong, in the Himalayas, with his daughter, Sai. The primary objective of this study is to examine the diaspora, work, and life themes, as well as the stylistic elements in Kiran Desai's oeuvre. It aims to analyse the ethnic, regional, and national particularities that encapsulate the entirety of human experience in the novel The Inheritance of Loss. Furthermore, it will explore the complexities of migrant experiences faced by numerous families in relation to their surrounding environment, investigate how the characters in the novel lose their cultural values and identities abroad, and delineate the immigrant sensibility reflected in Kiran Desai's life and the characters within “The Inheritance of Loss”.