Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

　　Praised by Salman Rushdie as "lush and intensely imagined," Kiran Desai's wryly comic story of life, love, and family relationships simultaneously captures the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience. A failure at school and a failure at work, a dreamer who spends his days dreaming in tea stalls and singing to himself in public gardens, 20-year-old Sampath Chawla hardly seems destined for great things. But one day, after climbing a guava tree in search of peaceful contemplation, Sampath awakes to find himself proclaimed "the Hermit of Shakhot." Embracing his new career as a holy man, Sampath unburdens himself of a wealth of hilariously prosaic and often uncanny revelations that upset the social equilibrium of his small hometown and send its outrageous inhabitants careening out of control.