Janine Cook, fiction buyer at rival Waterstones, said: “Some of the biggest-selling Booker victors have come from India, and this is one of the most compulsive Booker winners for years. It’s an amazing debut that has already done incredibly well for us, but will now move to a higher level altogether.”
The other authors on the shortlist were Philip Hensher for The Northern Clemency, Steve Toltz for A Fraction of the Whole, and Linda Grant for The Clothes on Their Backs.
The other judges were Alex Clark, critic and editor of Granta; the novelist Louise Doughty; James Heneage, the founder of Ottakar’s bookshops; and Hardeep Singh Kohli, the broadcaster.
Last year’s winner of the Booker prize was The Gathering by Anne Enright, which has now sold more than half a million copies in UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth.
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