Kiran Desai’s Inheritance

The first reviews of Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss are coming out; it sounds pretty good.

From The Boston Globe:
Kiran Desai’s ”The Inheritance of Loss” spans continents, generations, cultures, religions, and races. Like Desai’s acclaimed first novel, ”Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” its primary setting is India, in this case the remote province of Kalimpong during the mid-1980s.
The first sentence establishes the landscape as central: ”All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the winds at its summit.” Here in the foothills of the Himalayas, ”where India blurs into Bhutan and Sikkim,” 16-year-old Sai lives with her grandfather, an irascible retired judge, his cook, and his dog…
‘The Inheritance of Loss” offers all of the pleasures of traditional narrative in a form and a voice that are utterly fresh. Desai’s use of the omniscient point of view has the naturalness of Tolstoy, yet (enhanced, sometimes too exuberantly, by typographic hijinks) it’s as quick and quirky as rap music. Her rich and often wry descriptions — of people, places, weather, seasons — have the depth and resonance of Dickens laced with rueful postmodern ambivalence. Her insights into human nature, rare for so young a writer, juggle timeless wisdom and 21st-century self-doubt.”