Irish novelist Anne Enright has won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, beating out Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Indra Sinha (Animal’s People). Nikita Lalwani (Gifted) was cut from the shortlist. The Desi Literary Mafia is foiled this year.

The Gathering is about an Irish woman who is prompted by her brother’s suicide to revisit three generations of bleak history of her large, dysfunctional family… [This] is the fourth novel by the 45-year-old former television producer. [Link]

Ireland gets its fourth Booker winner after Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and John Banville. Former winner Ian McEwan goes home empty-handed.

Here’s the synopsis:

… Veronica recalls their childhood growing up in Dublin in a family of 14, with never enough money or enough attention from their overburdened parents. She’s convinced it all went wrong when Liam was sexually abused by a family friend, and her recollections of that day alternate with sunnier ones of their endless roughhousing and joking. When Liam drowned himself, with a tide of “blood, sea water and whiskey” running in his veins, he took Veronica’s sense of purpose with him. Inconsolable, and suffering from insomnia, she spends her evenings driving and writing, trying to come to terms with the fact that “someone you love is dead, and the world is full of people you don’t.” [Link]

Two annoyances: A couple of the books on the shortlist, Animal’s People and Darkmans by Nicola Barker, haven’t yet been released in the U.S. And those who are citizens here, born in the desh (ahem), can neither compete for the Booker nor run for President.