Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Hardcover)

Born during a torrential rainstorm, in Shahkot, India, to a mother whom the neighbours find distinctly odd, Sampath Chawla is a disappointment to his family. Nothing but trouble from the start, he disgraces himself at a wedding party, loses his job at the local post office and runs away from home to take refuge in the guava orchard, at the top of a guava tree. There he is mistaken for a holy man and seer when he reveals intimate secrets about the local inhabitants (gleaned from reading their mail in idle moments at the post office). His father can see there is money, at last, to be made from his idle son and sets about doing so with determination. A local journalist, however, is equally determined to unmask him. Although Desai writes with considerable flair, employing an inventive style of English reminiscent of a line of Indian authors from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy, there is something tiresome about this relentlessly perky comedy, and one has a slight suspicion that the European reader is being hoodwinked with fashionable pastiche. Midnight's Children has a lot to answer for. -- Lisa Jardine

Already championed by Salman Rushdie and serialized in the New Yorker, this is a wildly funny and clever book which will delight anyone who's ever felt out of step with the world. Shy and awkward Sampath Chawla, son of an eccentric gourmet, escapes the provincial rat race to live rough in a guava tree and commune with nature. Unfortunately, the world comes too - first his family, then a few curious sightseers, and finally a stampede of devotees, scattering garbage and seeking spiritual enlightenment. Meanwhile, a pack of drunken monkeys are terrorizing the crowds, a spy is after Mrs Chawla's recipes and Sampath's predatory sister is stalking the local ice cream man. Desai writes with lush sensuality and a keen eye for the engaging lunacy of small-town life. (Kirkus UK)

This enchanting first novel, set in the Indian village of Shakhot, details the agreeable chaos that ensues from its underachieving protagonist's decision to abandon the workaday world and live in a tree. That protagonist is Sampath Chawla, a child born during an insufferably hot summer (when "The bees flew drunk on nectar that had turned alcoholic") at the precise moment that a Red Cross plane delivering supplies to "famine camps" inadvertently showered its bounty on grateful Shakhot. This wry allusion to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is only one of numerous grace notes in a beguiling narrative that displays its character's eccentricities abundantly while never reducing them to caricatures. Sampath, at 20 having become a morose failure as a postal employee, attains widespread celebrity when his matter-of-fact revelations, delivered from the guava tree where he's taken residence, show a deep knowledge of his neighbors' secrets (he's gained it from secretly reading their mail), convincing all and sundry that "the Hermit of Shakhot" is "one of an unusual spiritual nature, his childlike ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom." Things grow more complicated when a passel of "cinema monkeys" (so named for their harassment of female moviegoers) join Sampath in his tree, the Atheist Society arranges surveillance of his "activity," and a research scientist, a retired Brigadier, a police superintendent, and other suspicious citizens lock horns with a hastily assembled Monkey Protection Society. Desai's affectionate scrutiny of her maladroit protagonist is further sweetened, as it were, by deft comic portraits of Sampath's family, including most memorably his food-fixated mother Kulfi and his desperate father, a "practical" martinet who laments: "What good is it to be the head of a family when you had a son who ran and sat in a tree?" Kiran Desai is the daughter of highly praised novelist Anita Desai. It's a pleasure to report that this particular fruit of a distinguished literary lineage, having fallen rather far from the tree, is producing bountiful and delicious results. (Kirkus Reviews)