This is the first time an Indian author has won the Man Booker prize after Arundhati Roy’s dazzling debutant novel The God of Small Things. In the shadow of Mount Kanchenjunga, in Kalimpong, lives a retired Gujarati Judge whose grand daughter Sai is the principal protagonist of the book. As is his cook’s son Biju; we watch in amazement as in the gathering storm of the Gurkha movement life begin to disintegrate. The book shifts from Kalimpong to America where Biju works as illegal alien and back. Everyone is soon caught in a vortex and slowly swept under. This book surely makes a hullabaloo even if the last book eight years ago did not.

The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford

Frank Bascombe reappears, as he has been every decade after the Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day(1995). In his new avatar he is a realtor peddling his stuff on the shores of New Jersey along with a Tibetan partner and he is having more than his share of bad luck. His second wife has left him to be with her arrived back from the dead first husband, his first wife wants to marry him, he is recovering from prostate cancer, his Tibetan partner wants to take over his business and his son and daughter are coming for Thanksgiving lunch with companions he does not know what to make of. And to add to his troubles, the election between Bush and Gore is undecided and he voted for Gore. Superbly told flawlessly rendered this is America at the turn of the millennium.

The Good Life
by Jay McInerney

McInerney takes on 9/11 and the fall of the World Trade Center and how it changes lives. 9/11 works both as a prism and as a mirror as the author takes us through two disintegrating marriages and two love affairs. Salman Rushdie makes a brief cameo appearance at the beginning of the book in what I thought was one of the book’s few false notes. The author makes this a happy story (it is at heart at a love story) in the time of sadness.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
by Haruki Murakami

I am convinced that the Japanese Master Haruki Murakami writes short fiction for relaxation and recreation. He makes it look so easy. After his spellbinding last novel Kafka on The Shore a book of short stories which has a little of everything. Particularly memorable is then story called Nausea 1979 about a man with the unfortunate habit of sleeping with his friends’ wives and girl friends and what happens to him. What is truly memorable is how the author in the last two sentences of the story inserts
himself into the story.

Moral Disorder and other stories
by Margaret Atwood

The Canadian master once again turns to short fiction and one can see all the Canadian colours like the white of winter, the red and brown of autumn and the green of spring. The title refers to what happens when Tig and Nell begin to live together after Tigmarriage implodes on a farm out in rural Canada. The book tells stories spanning a life time from childhood to old age. These stories paint a realistic picture of Canada.

Everyman
by Philip Roth

Philip Roth confronts death in his new book which is his. twenty seventh. This is not the rousing, lacerating Roth of Sabbath’s Theatre and ‘counterlife’. This is a more subdued performance. But the subject is different, the subject is not sex but death, a subject which requires more careful treatment possibly even more respect. But Roth deals with a subject which troubles all human beings.

A Spot of Bother
by Mark Haddon

There was the hilarious The Big Fat Greek Wedding and there was Monsoon Wedding—the big fat Indian wedding – and there was Four Weddings and a Funeral and big fat English weddings. Good films all. But a book on the subject doesn’t spring to mind immediately Though I am sure there is more than one. Now comes Mark Haddon’s tragic-comic novel, A spot of Bother about a big fat English wedding. After the brilliant The curious Incident of the dog in the Night Time his fabulous book about a boy suffering from Aspergers’ disease, a form of autism, and how he copes with the world now comes a competent second book about an English family trying to hold a wedding when everything around is collapsing. A story which would be tragic were it not so comic. Mark Haddon’s light touch rules the day.

The Interpretation of Murder
by Jed Rubenfeld

The Robert R Slaughter, Professor of Law at Yale University turns his powerful intellect to a fictional New York at the turn of the 19th century. Actually, 1909 Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have just arrived in New York. A series of murders is taking place Detective Littlemore and Coroner Heugel are given the task of solving them. In a corrupt ever changing New York where the first skyscrapers are coming up and cars are fighting with horses for ruling the street; they turn to Freud for help. And of course, if you turn to Freud can sex or psychoanalysis be far behind?

Theft: A Love Story
by Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story holds much promise. A vigorous writer who writes with a great deal of passion, Peter Carey tells the story through the twin voices of two brothers, one is nearly failed artist called Butcher Bones and the other a mentally impaired Slow Bones. They are soon joined by Mariene who sets of a chain of events with devastating effect. For much of the book, the reader gets the feeling he is swimming in treacle but soon the book takes off and then is simply unputdownable.