The international publishing sensation of 1997 — translated into 18 languages — a magical, sophisticated tour de force now available in a stunning Vintage Canada edition.

The God of Small Things heralds a voice so powerful and original that it burns itself into the reader's memory. Set mainly in Kerala, India, in 1969, it is the story of Rahel and her twin brother Estha, who learn that their whole world can change in a single day, that love and life can be lost in a moment. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they seek to craft a childhood for themselves amid the wreckage that constitutes their family. Sweet and heartbreaking, ribald and profound, this is a novel to set beside those of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606865613
Publisher:	Perfection Learning Corporation
Publication date:	02/02/2010
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	333
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She has worked as a production designer and written the screenplays for two films. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

Paradise Pickles & Preserves

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf-strewn driveway.

The house itself looked empty. The doors and windows were locked. The front verandah bare. Unfurnished. But theskyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins was still parked outside, and inside, Baby Kochamma was still alive.

She was Rahel's baby grandaunt, her grandfather's younger sister. Her name was really Navomi, Navomi Ipe, but everybody called her Baby. She became Baby Kochamma when she was old enough to be an aunt. Rahel hadn't come to see her, though. Neither niece nor baby grandaunt labored under any illusions on that account. Rahel had come to see her brother, Estha. They were two-egg twins. "Dizygotic" doctors called them. Born from separate but simultaneously fertilized eggs. Estha--Esthappen--was the older by eighteen minutes.

They never did look much like each other, Estha and Rahel, and even when they were thin-armed children, flat-chested, wormridden and Elvis Presley-puffed, there was none of the usual "Who is who?" and "Which is which?" from oversmiling relatives or the Syrian Orthodox bishops who frequently visited the Ayemenem House for donations.

The confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place.

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.

Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream.

She has other memories too that she has no right to have.

She remembers, for instance (though she hadn't been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches--Estha's sandwiches, that Estha ate--on the Madras Mail to Madras.

And these are only the small things.

Anyway, now she thinks of Estha and Rahel as Them, because, separately, the two of them are no longer what They were or ever thought They'd be.

Ever.

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.

Not old.

Not young.

But a viable die-able age.

They were nearly born on a bus, Estha and Rahel. The car in which Baba, their father, was taking Ammu, their mother, to hospital in Shillong to have them, broke down on the winding tea-estate road in Assam. They abandoned the car and flagged down a crowded State Transport bus. With the queer compassion of the very poor for the comparatively well off, or perhaps only because they saw how hugely pregnant Ammu was, seated passengers made room for the couple, and for the rest of the journey Estha and Rahel's father had to hold their mother's stomach (with them in it) to prevent it from wobbling. That was before they were divorced and Ammu came back to live in Kerala.

According to Estha, if they'd been born on the bus, they'd have got free bus rides for the rest of their lives. It wasn't clear where he'd got this information from, or how he knew these things, but for years the twins harbored a faint resentment against their parents for having diddled them out of a lifetime of free bus rides.

They also believed that if they were killed on a zebra crossing, the Government would pay for their funerals. They had the definite impression that that was what zebra crossings were meant for. Free funerals. Of course, there were no zebra crossings to get killed on in Ayemenem, or, for that matter, even in Kottayam, which was the nearest town, but they'd seen some from the car window when they went to Cochin, which was a two-hour drive away.

The Government never paid for Sophie Mol's funeral because she wasn't killed on a zebra crossing. She had hers in Ayemenem in the old church with the new paint. She was Estha and Rahel's cousin, their uncle Chacko's daughter. She was visiting from England. Estha and Rahel were seven years old when she died. Sophie Mol was almost nine. She had a special child-sized coffin.

Satin lined.

Brass handle shined.

She lay in it in her yellow Crimplene bell-bottoms with her hair in a ribbon and her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. Her face was pale and as wrinkled as a dhobi's thumb from being in water for too long. The congregation gathered around the coffin, and the yellow church swelled like a throat with the sound of sad singing. The priests with curly beards swung pots of frankincense on chains and never smiled at babies the way they did on usual Sundays.

What People are Saying About This

John Updike

A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.... A Tiger Woodsian debut.

Reading Group Guide

Plot Summary:

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month."

"Tomorrow."

Between this remarkable novel's first and last sentences, between May 1992 and December 1969, between the freighted present and past elusive hope, Arundhati Roy constructs a tale as far reaching and sensuous as myth, as inescapable as history, as passionate as the loves that impel the members of the Kochamma family to their fates. Told mainly from the perspective of 7-year-old Rahel and Estha, "two-egg twins," and from that of Rahel 23 years later, Roy's story focuses on two tragic events in 1969-the drowning of the twins' 9-year-old Anglo-English cousin, Sophie Mol, and the murder of Velutha, the Untouchable carpenter beloved by the twins and their divorced mother, Ammu. Moving back and forth through time, guiding us through the many-splendored mansion of her tale, Roy ingeniously reveals-chamber by chamber, heartbeat by heartbeat-the details, the "small things" that fill her characters' lives and furnish the dwellings that cannot protect them.

Topics for Discussion:
1. Who-or what-is the God of Small Things? What other names and what divine and earthly attributes are associated with this god? What-or who-are the Small Things over which this god has dominion, and why do they merit their own god?

2. What are the various laws, rules, and regulations-familial, social, cultural, political, and religious-including "the Love Laws," to which Roy makes repeated references?

3. Various dwellings are important to the unfolding of Roy's story. How is each described? To what extentdoes each embody or reflect the forces and burdens of history, social order, and custom?

4. How does the river that flows through Ayemenem in 1969 differ from the river in 1992? What is its importance in the lives and histories of the two families and in the twins' childhood?

5. To what extent are race, social class, and religion important? What specific elements of each take on predominant importance, and with what consequences? How do the concept and the reality of "the Untouchable" function in the novel?

About the Author: Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She has worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first book.

Interviews

On Tuesday, May 19th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Arundhati Roy, author of The GOD OF SMALL THINGS.

Moderator: Welcome to barnesandnoble.com, Arundhati Roy! We are so pleased that you could fit us in to your busy tour schedule to discuss your acclaimed novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS.

Dale H. from Williamsburg, VA: Your use of the English language in this book is very intriguing and highly original. It isn't to my ear British or American English. You seem to invent syntax. My question is this Did you borrow a form of storytelling from Indian oral traditions? And secondly, how would you describe your own writing style or "voice"?

Arundhati Roy: I don't describe it, in the sense that I have no perspective on my own language. I've often said that language is the skin [of] my throat...so I don't spend a lot of time analzying or thinking about it or defining it.

Taylor from Springfield: What was the reaction in India to your book and its success? Secondly, why do you think there has been such a popular resurgence in interest and appreciation of Indian novelists? A past issue of The New Yorker magazine was devoted to them. Congratulations on the Booker Prize!

Arundhati Roy: The reaction in India in many ways was the same as the reaction of the world. People have reacted to the emotional heart of the book. In India there has been some negative reaction. A man filed a criminal case against me for corrupting public morality. There was some trouble from the government in Kerala. But other than that the reaction has been the same as everywhere else in the world. There are writers from all sorts of places which are ex-colonies that somehow bring a new way of writing and thinking in English. These countries, truly, are now going through troubled times, and the moral dilemmas they are going through are huge, and therefore the stories are huge.

Leslie from Denver, Co: I haven't read THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS but have heard such wonderful things about it. My book club will be choosing it for our next discussion. Can you tell us in your own words what it is about? Thanks -- I love hearing how authors describe their own books.

Arundhati Roy: Unfortunately, this author doesn't describe her books, because I think a story is the simplest way of describing a complex world, and I can't simplify it any further.

Emily Berry from Baltimore, MD: At the beginning of your novel you distinguish quite clearly between "the god of small things" and "the god of large things." Is this distinction one that carries special force or weight for a nontraditional Westerner? For someone making the transition from a traditional society and culture to modernism? On what grounds should this distinction appeal to members of contemporary Western culture?

Arundhati Roy: Well, to answer the second part, since I am not a part of contemporary Western culture I can't speak for it. For me the book is about connections and how the smallest things connect to the biggest things. And thereby create the texture which eventually becomes human history.

Blake Katz from Santa Fe, NM: I read your book, and though I enjoyed the language, I did not find anything necessarily positive or redeeming in its message. In your view, is it necessary to find something redeeming in any of your characters? Do you think any of the characters have redeeming qualities? Or is the search for such qualities by the reader irrelevant? If so, why?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I often say a story is like the surface of water, and you can see what you wish to see in it. The book never offers you one solution or one way of seeing things. It is about how there is tragedy, happiness, sadness, little fish of shame in a sea of glory. It isn't about something redeeming or not, it is a view of the world, and there is everything in it.

Karin H from Charlotte, NC: You must have had a rich set of experiences growing up to write such an interesting book. Is this book at all reflective of your life? Do you have a special affinity or similarity to any of the characters?

Arundhati Roy: Well, for me, fiction is philosophy...a meditation about the world. This book is located very close to me, but it is not autobiographical. It is located from the clay of the world that I know and located in the village that I grew up in.

Felix Reategui from Lima, Peru: I find Naipaul an extraordinary writer, though I've often wondered how acute his views are about Indian civilization and people. Do you recognize your huge and extremely varied country in his writings? What are your feelings towards him? Do you have him on your mind for your creative fiction? (By the way, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS is extraordinary -- needless to say, no?) Thanks.

Arundhati Roy: I think that Naipaul is an extraordinary writer. The great thing about him is he is so much in control of his art. You have to admire his vision.

Paul from Morris Plains, NJ: How did you get this book published? Were you at all surprised at the tremendous success your book had with reviewers and readers alike?

Arundhati Roy: Well, it seemed as if the stars were right, and the waters parted in a total magical way. But quite simply, someone that I know who read my book sent it to an agent in England. They read it and took the next plane to India. That's how it got published.

Nelson from London: When are you going to write another book?

Arundhati Roy: Don't know.

Nicole from Sudbury, MA: Is it true that it took you five years to write this book? Did you really write for five hours a day? Wow!

Arundhati Roy: Not five hours a day -- a little less, especially in the initial stages. I wrote for about four. But it did take me four and half years to write it.

Barbara C. from Syracuse: I am interested in your religious background. Are you Syrian Christian? Do you know when Syrian Christians first arrived in India? Why did they emigrate there? Syrian Christians are obviously a distinctive, peculiar minority in India. What function does this serve in the novel?

Arundhati Roy: The Syrian Christians didn't emigrate. They are a minority not just in India but also in Kerala, the southernmost state of India. In my book, it doesn't really matter whether they are people belonging to another religion. Kerala is a unique state. Some of the greatest religious figures lived there. The book is really about how these edifices that are constructed by the human intellect are leveled by human nature. It is more about biology than history.

Cary Carson from Newport: What would you identify as the universal themes in your novel? I see for instance gender relations, child abuse, the legacy of Western imperialism/colonialism in non-Western society, class, and the impact of Western technologies on a traditional society as a few. Am I warm?

Arundhati Roy: Well, I think it is a book about love and loss and childhood and really about [how] since the dawn of time human societies have found ways to divide themselves up and make war and love across these divisions.

Martin from Boston, MA: Who are some of your literary influences? Are you a fan of Kipling or Gabriel García Márquez?

Arundhati Roy: I am an immense fan of Kipling -- I could recite him before I could read. I don't necessarily agree with his stated views on India, but I think he was a great writer. Joyce, Nabokov...Marquez is great but I don't think an influence. Magic realism isn't really my genre.

Janine from Yarmouth: Do you plan to do any more work on films or screenwriting?

Arundhati Roy: I don't have any plans, and I don't know what I am going to do.

Ritu Bontha from Houston, TX: I enjoyed THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS very much, particularly the poetic prose in which it is written. I wondered if you considered Velutha the "god of small things" or if the title is simply a metaphor. Also, I read much of the book following Rahel as the heroine but began to wonder towards the end if Ammu was the true "heroine." Or perhaps there was no hero to speak of. Have you written anything else (I know that there are two screenplays) that are available to us to read? I'd also like to know when you may be in Houston, Texas.

Arundhati Roy: Well, as I said, I don't want to legislate who is the heroine. I want everyone to draw what they want from the story. The god of small things is the inversion of what they think of god as. It is a powerless god in a way. A god of loss.And no, the screenplays haven't been published.

Melanie L. from San Diego, CA: What is your view of the special significance of fraternal twins? Does one usually find that of the two, one is stronger, one dependent? How would you describe the relationship between Estha and Rahel? Why did you choose to write about twins?

Arundhati Roy: For me it was somehow to explore something that was intrinsically brutal in our natures. They were really doing that; they loved each other with an inarticulate, aching love. This was interesting to me because you don't really understand love until you understand its brutality. So that is why I chose to write about them.

Paul from Fort Myers, FL: Your language is very colorful and almost musical -- full of metaphors. Did you find the words came easily, or did you do a lot of rewriting? What type of writing schedule did you keep? Congratulations on the success of your novel -- well deserved!

Arundhati Roy: No, I didn't do a lot of rewriting. I am not searching for words, and I don't suffer while I write in that sense. But I am quite disciplined in my writing. I worked every day on the novel when I was writing it.

Renee from Middlebrook: I really loved your playfulness with punctuation, capitalization, and spelling ("Infinnate Joy"). It was so refreshing. How and why did you decide to use this play on words?

Arundhati Roy: I don't know the answer to that. I just think that when you are somehow in touch with your childhood and still remember how to play, these things happen.

Moderator: Thank you for this fascinating discussion of THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS. Do you have any closing comments for your online audience?

Arundhati Roy: I don't want to talk any more than what is in my book. Thank you.

Introduction

The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. We hope they will give you a number of interesting angles from which to consider this mesmerizing work of fiction, a novel that is simultaneously mysterious, poetic, and romantic.

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The Lawlessness of Love
To read Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things, is to remind oneself how large the gods that dispense literary talent can be: Roy writes with extraordinary grace, creating a world so vivid and strangely beautiful that reading it is akin to entering a mirage. Like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Divakaruni, Roy is fascinated by the collision of the ancient and modern in India -- the age-old class hatreds and bigotry that continue to thrive beneath roofs studded with satellite dishes. And like those writers, she is expert at limning the territory of cultural dislocation. Roy's achievement lies in her ability to explore this dislocation through the ebbing fortunes of one particular Indian family. The story of the privileged yet doomed Kochammas is in many ways a miniaturized tale of India itself, a country in which, as Roy states, "misfortune is always relative," a country in which personal turmoil is dwarfed by the "vast, violent, insane public turmoil of a nation."
The novel opens with the return of Rahel Kochamma to her home in the southwest Indian province of Kerala 23 years after the drowning of her eight-year-old cousin, Sophie. Rahel has returned to see her twin brother, Estha, who was abruptly sent away in the aftermath of Sophie's death; he has himself only recently returned, rendered literally silent by that long-ago trauma. The landscape Rahel walks through is fecund and dank: "Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks. Black crows gorge on bright mangoes." The riotous imagery is intentional: the monsoon air causes "locked windows to burst open," and "strange insects to appear...like ideas in the evenings." The sense of secrets about to burst, of tenuous bonds about to snap, pervades the narrative. The once-prosperous family Rahel is returning to (they used to own a thriving pickle factory) has been decimated: Rahel and Estha's mother, Ammu, is dead; their grief-stricken Marxist uncle, Chacko, a Rhodes scholar, has emigrated to Canada; Mammachi, their grandmother, is also dead. The only one that remains is their grand-aunt Baby Kochamma, whose obsessive love for gardening has been supplanted by a newfound passion for televised NBA tournaments and "Bold and the Beautiful" reruns. Seeing her seated in her turmeric-stained nightgown, swinging her puffy, tiny, manicured feet, it is hard to imagine the damage Baby wreaked on the twins so many years earlier.
It is to Roy's credit that the story that eventually surfaces of Baby's own past, including her unrequited love for a Benedictine monk, explains her actions while never excusing them. Indeed, the histories of all the members of the Kochamma clan -- unconventional, mysterious Ammu; Pappachi, the twins' grandfather, an accomplished but unacknowledged entomologist; Velutha, the gifted yet doomed untouchable -- are so fully portrayed that it is impossible to see even the most heinous among them as guilty. We see their foibles, dreams, weaknesses, and fury; we see them, in short, within the context of their own histories, and within the larger context of their position within Indian society. Wisely, Roy lets the fragments of their stories emerge gradually. Shifting back and forth through time, Roy circles the events of that summer slowly, all the while tightening the noose of her narrative. If the effect is occasionally chaotic, like the jumbled colors of a kaleidoscope before a pattern clicks into place, the complexity of Roy's mosaic redeems her.
A dazzling way with language doesn't hurt, either. In the humid atmosphere she has created, language itself seems to have twisted and exploded. Roy doesn't hesitate to make up words when ordinary ones don't suffice. Hence afternoon nightmares are called "aftermares," and fat Uncle Chacko's suit grows "less bursty" as he turns shy in front of the daughter he has not seen in several years. Odd yet compelling images abound: A house wears its steep gabled roof "pulled low over its ears, like a low hat." Bright plastic bags blow across the river bordering their home like "subtropical flying-flowers."
The God of Small Things isn't just about a summer when two children's innocence -- and a third's life -- is lost. It is about a country in which, as Roy states, "various kinds of despair compete for primacy." While exploring societal taboos and the often fatal consequences for those who disregard them, Roy, through the relationship between Estha and Rahel, also explores the limits of loyalty and the essential "Law-lessness" of love. In linking the political turmoil of India to the members of this extraordinary family, Roy has offered us a radically new history, a world so deeply imagined that it -- like the best of fictions -- reads as truth. The ability to touch and be touched, Roy knows, lies beyond legislation.
—Sarah Midori Zimmerman

bn.com

Arundhati Roy's rich, humid fairy tale of a novel begins in June, when the monsoon rains send the province of Kerala, in southwestern India, into fecund frenzy: "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Behind this lush life, however, something festers. Rahel Kochamma, one of the novel's twin protagonists, returns to her family home in the Kerali town of Ayemenem, and decay slithers out to greet her. The house walls "bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against glistening stone."
This slithering overripeness hints at what's really rotten in Ayemenem: the past, specifically a chain of events set in motion on "a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent)," when the twins' half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, came to visit. Two weeks later Sophie was dead, drowned in Ayemenem's river, leaving behind a shattered family and a terrible secret. The narrative eddies along toward the secret of Sophie's death, but ultimately it flows into the drowning depths of history. The God of Small Things is a story of forbidden, cross-caste love and what a community will do to protect the old ways. The Kochamma family business, Paradise Pickles and Preserves, is emblematic of the theme. Ayemenem is practically pickled in history. Roy, an architect and screenwriter who grew up in Kerala, capably shoulders the burdens of caste and tradition, a double weight that crushes some of her characters and warps others, but leaves none untouched.
Roy takes up classic material, but she delights in verbal innovation and stylistic tricks. She runs words together -- "thunderdarkness," "echoing stationsounds" -- and plucks nouns from verbs and verbs from thin air. And she has hit on a striking way of getting at a child's point of view (told in third person, the story unfolds more or less as young Rahel and Estha experience it). When her mother tells a rambunctious Rahel to "Stoppit," Rahel "stoppited." At Sophie's funeral, a bat alights on a mourner: "the singing stopped for a 'Whatisit?' 'Whathappened?' and for a Furrywhirring and a Sariflapping."
At times it feels as though you've dropped into a faux Rushdie novel, with cartwheeling corpses and talking statues. Mostly, though, Roy's verbal exuberance is all her own, and it makes The God of Small Things a real pleasure. History's lessons may be bitter, but Roy serves them up fresh, pungent and delicious. -- Salon

Jennifer Howard

With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailtiesand in one case, a repulsively evil powerin subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This "piercing study of childhood innocence lost" mirrors the growing pains of modern India. Twin sister and brother Rahel and Estha are at the center of a family in crisis and at the heart of this "moving and compactly written book." (LJ 4/15/97)

Library Journal

A brilliantly constructed first novel that untangles an intricate web of sexual and caste conflict in a vivid style reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's early work. The major characters are Estha and Rahel, the fraternal twin son and daughter of a wealthy family living in the province of Kerala. The family's prosperity is derived from a pickle factory and rubber estate, and their prideful Anglophilia essentially estranges them from their country's drift toward Communism and their "inferiors' " hunger for independence and equality.
The events of a crucial December day in 1969—including an accidental death that may have been no accident and the violent consequences that afflict an illicit couple who have broken "the Love Law"—are the moral and narrative center around which the episodes of the novel repeatedly circle. Shifting backward and forward in time with effortless grace, Roy fashions a compelling nexus of personalities that influence the twins' "eerie stealth" and furtive interdependence. These include their beautiful and mysteriously remote mother Ammu; her battling "Mammachi" (who runs the pickle factory) and "Pappachi" (an insufficiently renowned entomologist); their Oxford-educated Marxist Uncle Chacko and their wily "grandaunt" Baby Kochamma; and the volatile laborite "Untouchable" Velutha, whose relationship with the twins' family will prove his undoing. Roy conveys their explosive commingling in a vigorous prose dominated by odd syntactical and verbal combinations and coinages (a bad dream experience during midday nap-time is an "aftermare") reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," incantatory repetitions, striking metaphors (Velutha is seen "standing in the shade of the rubber trees with coins of sunshine dancing on his body") and sensuous descriptive passages ("The sky was orange, and the coconut trees were sea anemones waving their tentacles, hoping to trap and eat an unsuspecting cloud").

In part a perfectly paced mystery story, in part an Indian Wuthering Heights: a gorgeous and seductive fever dream of a novel, and a truly spectacular debut.

Kirkus Reviews

Dazzling . . . as subtle as it is powerful.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA Today

“The quality of Ms. Roy’s narration is so extraordinary—at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple—that the reader remains enthralled all the way through.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.”—John Updike, The New Yorker

“Outstanding. A glowing first novel.”—Newsweek

“Splendid and stunning.”—The Washington Post Book World

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