Chawla later in life when his son grows up to become a young man possessed of a great deal of feeling and very little common sense or ambition. Chawla is a man for whom 'oddness, like aches and pains, fits of tears and lethargy' is a source of discomfort he fears 'these uncontrollable, messy puddles of life, the sticky humanness of things.' This distaste for sticky humanness will prove problematic for Mr. As her husband and mother-in-law retreated in horror, not daring to upset her or the baby still inside her, she drew a parade of cooks beheading goats.' Sampath's father, Mr. Finally, in desperation for another landscape, she found a box of old crayons in the back of a cupboard and. All about her the summer stretched white-hot into an infinite distance. His mother, Kulfi, half-maddened by heat and hunger, can think of nothing but food: 'Her stomach grew larger. Indian writer Kiran Desai begins her first novel with Sampath's birth at the tail-end of a terrible drought. Pity the poor Chawla family of Shahkot, India-their son, Sampath causes all kinds of trouble for his family, culminating in a Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, but in a village like Shakhot, hullabaloo is a way of life. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. A syndicate of larcenous, alcoholic monkeys terrorize the pilgrims who cluster around Sampath’s tree, spies and profiteers descend on the town, and none of Desai’s outrageous characters goes unaffected as events spin increasingly out of control. After years of failure at school, failure at work, of spending his days dreaming in tea stalls, it does not seem as if Sampath is going to amount to much until one day he climbs a guava tree in search of peaceful contemplation and becomes unexpectedly famous as a holy man, sending his tiny town into turmoil. Sampath Chawla was born in a time of drought into a family not quite like other families, in a town not quite like other towns. Now available for the first time as a Grove Press paperback, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard Desai’s dazzling debut novel is a wryly hilarious and poignant story that simultaneously captures the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience.

Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai is one of the most talented writers of her generation.

Hullabaloo in the guava orchard book