Washington : Pulitzer Prize winning Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel, "The Lowland" failed to win the 2013 US National Book Award in fiction losing out to author James McBride.
McBride's "The Good Lord Bird", about the journey of a young slave in the 1850s scored over Lahiri's tale of two brothers set in Kolkata of the 1960s.
Other fiction finalists were Rachel Kushner for "The Flamethrowers"; Thomas Pynchon for "Bleeding Edge"; and George Saunders for "Tenth of December".
At Wednesday's award giving ceremony in New York, the judges praised McBride for "a voice as comic and original as anywe have heard since Mark Twain."
