A Reverse Passage to India Filled with Wit - Rated 
If you like humorous books about how people live self-sabotaging lives to preserve their illusions of superiority, The Inheritance of Loss will delight you. If you prefer a novel that carries a strong plot line and significant developments you cannot predict, you'll wonder why anyone would read this book.
As I read the book, I was reminded of P.G. Wodehouse's writing. Mr. Wodehouse's novels were all rather similar, silly, and filled with predictable situations. But on each page there was a sentence that was so novel, fresh, and intriguing that it would stop your eyes while you thought about what you had just read.
Ms. Desai demonstrates a similar ability to create startling writing, but in her case the writing brings out loud laughter . . . at least it does for me. My wife said she hadn't heard me laugh so much while reading a book in years.
Here's an example. A group of young men is demonstrating in favor of independence. One talks about a better world he wants to create: "We will provide jobs for our sons. We will give dignity to our daughters carrying heavy loads, breaking stone on the road." That vision of male liberation has to make you laugh.
The other genius of the book is demonstrated by the ironies that Ms. Desai shares with us to suggest that our dreams are pretty dangerous. Why are they so dangerous? Dreams assume we control what happens to use. Ms. Desai is describing a world where someone with a sense of humor is running the show. For example, her father strives hard to become an astronaut . . . but loses his life in a mundane accident in a country he would never have visited if he hadn't had such a dream.
You could draw the conclusion from that example that Ms. Desai is a cynic. Actually, she loves people and finds them comically naive when it comes to pursuing their dreams. Her prescription would be to get some good information and then choose a direction that is practical for accomplishing something you want. Too many of the dreams she portrays are about class, status, and envy. Those dreams should always be suspect. Her vision is of a world where those perceptions should be no longer relevant, as A Passage to India taught.
I liked the way that she combined the ideas of people traveling to other countries and to other parts of Asia in search of something that they thought they couldn't find at home. That's why I called the book a reverse Passage to India. The most developed characters in this book are Indians who left India for at least a time in search of their dreams.
Be prepared for much fun. The book's main drawback from my perspective is that the humorous sentences thinned out considerably in the final third of the book, giving the ending a tone that didn't match the earlier fun. The marvelous ironies continue but they aren't so much fun.
Universal themes made personal - Rated 
I have to disagree with many reviews of this book: I found it compelling, entertaining, beautifully written and thought-provoking. Anyone who has spent any period of their life living away from home for whatever reason will identify with the distracted difficulty of living "in a single existence at one time" that this book evokes.
I concede that it is a little flawed in structure and style, however I found the writing to be astonishingly lucid, humorous and insightful. The novel is built from a series of vignettes, some of which read almost as discrete short stories, some of which are as short as a couple of sentences. This approach is effective in portraying impactful images of setting and experience, and in supporting the theme of historical incoherence, where events develop almost of their own accord, nudged along by the naive and ignorant actions of people.
Elsewhere the themes of displacement, the complexity of distance, nostalgia, alienation from self and others, inauthenticity, foreign-ness, self-consciousness and human weakness across the generations are all played out under the shadow of Kanchenjunga mountain, the ultimate representation of truth and authenticity.
Desai throws us into the alienation experience of her characters by peppering her prose with unfamiliar Indian words. With the exception of Sai, Gyan and Biju, she identifies key characters either by their occupation or their nickname, in order to emphasise the mask of persona and lack of authentic will in each. Much more is made of the judge's affection for his pet dog Mutt than of the story of young love between Sai and Gyan, though in the end, youthful truth, love, wisdom and honesty provide precarious glimmers of hope and redemption.
The political buzzwords that appear on the dust jacket of this book don't really do it justice at all. This is a powerful and lyrically presented account of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the personal and the universal, and how one is so frequently and tragically ignorant of the other.
Surprise Booker Prize winner - Rated 
I am sure I'm not the only one who was filled with expectation for this novel and was then a little disappointed with the outcome. I found the interjection of Indian words very frustrating at times, as one can usually work out what these mean by the context of the sentence, however there were often times that I felt a glossary of terms might have been useful. I also found myself not really empathising with many of the central characters, especially Biju and Gyan.
On the positive side, Desai's writing style made picturing the scenery surrounding the Himalayas quite easy and also the way the story alternated between characters was interesting. There were often times that a question arose from what I had just read, to be met with the answer a few paragraphs later, which satified my curiosity well.
The conclusion of the book seemed a little rushed for my liking and, although this is often the case and can't be helped, the story did not develop and evolve as I would have expected, which then left me with a sense of unfinished business.
I think I would have preferred it if I had just picked this book up of my own volition and not had such high hopes. The story may then have been appreciated for what it is and not what the hype had suggested.
Beautiful but disappointing - Rated
I had such high expectations when picking up this book, I really expected a treasure: what I got was a real disappointment.
In fairness, it is beautifully written with exquisite use of description, but I really struggled to get into or even locate the story and there's a limit to how long you can feel satisfied with gorgeous imagery alone. After 100 pages I really didn't know where this was going; after 200 pages I still couldn't work out who you would consider the protagonist AND I still didn't know where it was going; by page 300 I was sure that it wasn't going anywhere substantial and I was bored of waiting to find out.
The characters all have potential but I didn't really believe in any of them, in part because whenever Desai starts with one person's story she always has an eye on someone else, so a character can occupy her for sometimes only a few lines before she wants to hop over to someone or something else. She left a lot of loose ends, a lot of things unexplained and a lot too was lost in the fact that it took me so long to plod through this novel that I forgot things. There's no real story as such -there's an overarching theme of repeating sadness but nothing that keeps you reading - and even the uprising that appears in the book never seems remoting likely to introduce any narrative tension
So, a big disappointment. It gets three stars from me for its language, but it's neither an easy nor an enjoyable read. So, if you like beautiful language I would recommend the first few chapters and then go on and find something more engaging.
Disappointment - Rated 
Not a lot to say about this book. Beautifully written of course but like so many "award winning" or "highly recommended" books which have been thrust at us recently, this is just not true story telling - wonderful characters but they go nowhere - superb scenes are set but there's no intrigue, no plot, NO STORY. One feels cheated and manipulated. A writer who can write "grand narratives" should be able to entertain as well as astound us. Come on people, let's get back to good old-fashioned stories.
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