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`Finding a publisher was a nightmare'

Mukund Padmanabhan

The Inheritance Of Loss may have won the Man Booker Prize but author Kiran Desai had an ``incredibly difficult'' time finding a publisher for the novel. In an interview to The Hindu , which took place a few days ago during the Frankfurt Book Fair, Kiran described the effort of finding a publisher as a ``nightmare." In contrast, it was much easier to sell her first novel, Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard, published in 1988.

Revealing that she had to pare down The Inheritance Of Loss from 1,500 pages to about 300 pages, Kiran said she continues to wonder whether the novel ``is soggy in the middle... I still think there are little dead bits in the book.''

Although the novel is set against the background of the Gorkhaland movement, she said her purpose was not so much to write a political novel but to examine how people deal with such situations — ``how they survive, who goes under, who comes out alive, who pays the price for what is happening.''

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