I needed a book for a trip and, lured by the prizes the book has won that were noted on the cover, grabbed this one in an airport bookstore. I was a little disappointed. The story is set in northern India during the 1980s as the Nepalese are beginning to struggle for their independence. The main characters include a retired judge who prefers his dog to any human being, his orphaned granddaughter who lives with him, her Nepalese tutor, the cook, and the cook's son who has immigrated to the U.S. and is barely able to scrape out the poorest of existences. In the end, I did not really like ANY of the characters. In particular, the retired judge who is the literal and symbolic patriarch of all the main characters was abhorrent to me. I really wanted to like the central character, the young girl who comes to live with her grandfather, and sometimes I did, but in the end I found I wasn't too caught up in her possible fate. Perhaps Desai was trying to say that repression warps the soul; the characters were not particularly likable to me and I found this book too depressing.