Product Description

After years of failure at school and work, and of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it doesn't seem as if post-office clerk Sampath Chawla is going to amount to much. But then he climbs a guava tree and becomes unexpectedly famous as a guru.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76932 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Born during a torrential rainstorm, in Shahkot, India, to a mother whom the neighbours find distinctly odd, Sampath Chawla is a disappointment to his family. Nothing but trouble from the start, he disgraces himself at a wedding party, loses his job at the local post office and runs away from home to take refuge in the guava orchard, at the top of a guava tree. There he is mistaken for a holy man and seer when he reveals intimate secrets about the local inhabitants (gleaned from reading their mail in idle moments at the post office). His father can see there is money, at last, to be made from his idle son and sets about doing so with determination. A local journalist, however, is equally determined to unmask him. Although Desai writes with considerable flair, employing an inventive style of English reminiscent of a line of Indian authors from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy, there is something tiresome about this relentlessly perky comedy, and one has a slight suspicion that the European reader is being hoodwinked with fashionable pastiche. Midnight's Children has a lot to answer for. --Lisa Jardine

Customer Reviews

fine first novel, but usual first novel flaws...
Bought this because I'm too stingy to buy her Booker winner till it comes out as a paperback. She's a very talented writer - natural comic writing, very gentle humour. I fear this book paints a picture of a lagely imaginary India, or an India long since passed, but I greatly enjoyed the characterisations and the situations. The first 50 pages in particular are first class. Thereafter her focus slips a little and we get into first-novel-it is. I suspect The Inheritance of Loss is a fine book - she's taken 7 years to write it, and all the signs of an exceptionally talented natural writer are there to be seen in Hullaballoo

An absolute and utter delight
One of the nicest books I have read in years. Beautifully written and utterly compelling. I was genuinely upset when I reached the end - I just wanted to have more; to spend more time with the delightful characters that Kiran Desai has created. I'm buying it as presents for loads of folk this Christmas - it's a real treat.

Intelligent, laugh out loud funny!
I aven't read a book I have liked so much since Annie Proulx's Shipping News. This is a very funny story about a family in India, whose son goes slightly off the rails. The results are hilarious. This story makes for a wonderful debut by the dughter of the famous autor, Anita Desai.