There is plenty of beauty and plenty of horror in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. The book is set in the 1980s in Kalimpong, a town on the Indian side of the Himalayas, where the characters (an orphan girl named Sai, her grandfather the judge, their cook, Sai's Nepali tutor Gyan, and - in a parallel storyline - the cook's son Biju trying to live and work in America) live out lives set in motion by Western colonization and continuing to be shaped by global corporate and political forces:

"Sai realized that her own delivery to Kalimpong in such a manner was merely part of the monotony, not the original. The repetition had willed her, anticipated her, cursed her, and certain moves made long ago had produced all of them."

Desai raises many big and important questions ("But the child shouldn't be blamed for a father's crime...but should the child therefore also enjoy the father's illicit gain?" Sai muses at one point upon reading a British book on India) and depicts a range of issues (bride-burning, domestic violence, the rise of nationalist militias, poverty, immigrant labour exploitation and police brutality) as part of the legacy of colonialism.

The story of Biju working and living illegally in New York, being exploited and humiliated by his employers and customers, mirrors the humiliation many of the characters living in Kalimpong go through. For some of the characters in Kalimpong, they cope with their humiliation by brutalizing women and animals. Though all the characters are distinct, none can totally escape from the legacy left to them.

At one point in the book Desai writes: "There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things: justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization."