Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Description

Winner of the Betty Trask Award, Kiran Desai’s dazzling debut novel is a hilarious story of life, love, and family that tells the surprising and delightful story of a young man’s unusual path to fame in a small Northern Indian city

Praised by Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz, among others, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard was published to great acclaim in 1998, and established Kiran Desai as a vivid literary voice eight years before The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize. 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. After years of failure and 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. A syndicate of larcenous, alcoholic monkeys terrorizes 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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Kiran Desai
Published: 05/13/2025
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802163981
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.44lbs
Size: 0.80″ H x 8.10″ L x 5.40″ W

About the Author
Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and the Man Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss. Educated in India, England, and the United States, she received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.