This year's Booker prize jury might well have got themselves into a fix with their shortlist. Apart from Sarah Waters' Night Watch, her fourth novel, and Kate Grenville's The Secret River, this was a bunch of Booker virgins, first novelists or writers new to the heady altitudes of literary prizes. And any one of them would have been a worthy winner. Impossible, in a sense, to choose between Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk, MJ Hyland's Carry Me Down, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. In the end, of course, Booker pulled it off, as it usually does. Once Desai took the podium, the youngest woman ever to take the prize, all doubts fell away. Here was a natural winner, a committed writer who had laboured hard to express her particular vision.

Inevitably, there was some grumbling that St Aubyn is a better stylist, or Matar (my personal favourite) a deeper intelligence, but as an Indian writer reflecting on the intimacies of village life in the tradition of Narayan, among others, Desai fitted the bill. She joins a long list including Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth who have universalised the experience of the subcontinent in a way that speaks to English audiences. Ironically, it is the daughter not the mother (Anita Desai) who takes London's literary Palme d'Or.

The critic John Sutherland rather snootily observed that this is "a globalised novel for a globalised world", but that, it seems to me, is the point about an international prize like Booker. Once upon a time, it was handed out over cocktails at the Cafe Royale to a member of the metropolitan establishment. Now, the prize is a global literary event, watched from Vanuatu to Vancouver, and it needs a novel to fit that bill. Not every Booker panel brings this off, but this year's team, a highly-qualified and canny group, have fulfilled their task in resounding style. A competition that seemed in danger of being taken over by the bookies (every one of whose predictions has proved hilariously inept), has finally recovered some literary dignity in the celebration of east-west values. No one mentioned the "war on terror" last night but, in hindsight, it seems arguable that, unconsciously at least, this Booker jury wanted to find some good news for the contemporary reader of fiction, something humane, and something wise and tender. The Inheritance of Loss fulfils this great expectation.