The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things was published in 1997 and was Arundhati Roy's first novel. It won the Booker Prize that year and became a bestseller, and it has remained her best-known work. The setting is Kerala in southern India, in a Syrian Christian family in the town of Ayemenem, and the novel moves between 1969, when Estha and Rahel are children, and 1993, when the twins meet again in adulthood.

The book is not told in order. Scenes from the two periods are set against each other, and phrases, images and objects return with the force of memory rather than of plot: the river, the pickle factory the family runs, the road to the airport, a car surrounded by protesters. Roy writes the twins' perceptions directly, in a language of compressed compounds and repeated words, so that the children's way of seeing carries the story instead of commentary about it.

Around the twins are the adults whose choices decide everything: Ammu, their mother, divorced and dependent on the family; Mammachi, the grandmother who runs the business; Baby Kochamma, the grand-aunt whose resentment helps set the disaster going; and Chacko, the Oxford-educated uncle who talks about history and principles. Caste, colonialism and the politics of 1960s Kerala run underneath the family story. The novel is now a set text in schools and universities in several countries.