The 2006 Man Booker prize has been awarded to Kiran Desai for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss.John Sutherland, chairman of last year’s Booker judges, told the London Times: “It is a really good novel but it needs a going-over by a good editor. The novel needs control.”
And while the Guardian quotes Sutherland's positive comments for Desai's novel--he said, "Desai's novel registers the multicultural reverberations of the new millennium with the sensitive instrumentality of fiction, as Jhabvala and Rushdie did previous eras ... It is a globalised novel for a globalised world"--it also noted that his favorite novel on the shortlist was Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk.
Click here to read an excerpt from The Inheritance of Loss.
As Perry Middlemiss noted, "bookmakers had Desai ranked 5th favourite out of the six shortlisted novels."
Previous "bad Booker beats":
Erica Wagner's bad Booker beat
In praise of David Mitchell
Martyn Goff's bad Booker beat
The Booker Prize's "Henry Fonda" year
On the Booker and other literary prizes
--Marshal Zeringue
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