BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Inheritance of Loss)(The Thin Place)(The Worst Hard Time)(American Vertigo)(Book Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press; $24). Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states--Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet--meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human...

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