This year's Booker McConnell prize for fiction has been won by an Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, for her first novel The God of Small Things. The prize, now in its 29th year and worth £20,000, remains Britain's most prestigious if maligned literary prize. It was presented to Ms Roy (37) last night in London's Guildhall.
The result is a disappointment not only for the Irish, who had hopes for Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes, a gentle story about a woman quietly confronting the various conflicts life presents her as a daughter, reluctant mother, lover and professional composer.
It is his first novel in 14 years and was well reviewed in Britain.
Many observers had tipped Roy's book, confident that the hype would sway the judges. Another favourite among critics was Jim Crace's Quarantine, an engaging novel about a group of pilgrims, including Jesus Christ, who arrive in the Judaean desert 2,000 years ago for prayer and fasting.
Restricted to novels written by British, Commonwealth, South African and Irish writers, the Booker has created many angry debates and controversies over the years. This year's shortlist is unique only for the indifference inspired by a dull selection in an unexceptional literary year dominated by several fine and ineligible American novels.
Even before it was published last May, Roy's novel had received extreme reactions from reviewers who either praised it for its lushness and naivety or dismissed it as a cloying, overwritten exercise in designer exotic.
Set in south India, it centres on the death of a young Anglo-Indian girl while visiting relatives there, and its subsequent impact on the respective lives of her cousins, a twin brother and sister.
Far from being an outstanding exponent of Indian fiction, Ms Roy, who lives in Delhi, becomes the fourth Indian writer to win the prize following V.S. Naipaul in 1971 with In A Free State; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in 1975 for Heat and Dust; and Salman Rushdie for Midnight's Children in 1981, still one of the most famous winners and judged in 1993 as the Booker of Bookers.
