[amblago]

Looking for the title of a book that was a NY times best seller. Story of a young girl in India who lives with her grandfather in rural northern area on the Nepal border. She is an orphan. The story is also about the conflict between Nepal and India in the 1970's.

[Couchcarrot]

"The Inheritance of Loss," by Kiran Desai.

Here's more info about the book from the New York Times
web site:

"The Inheritance of Loss" opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.