The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things is a debut novel that reads like nothing else. Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 with a book that is playful and heartbreaking in equal measure, about how small moments and unspoken rules can destroy a family.

The story is set in Ayemenem, a town in Kerala in southern India. It moves between 1969, when seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel live with their divorced mother Ammu and their extended family, and 1993, when the twins, now adults and damaged by what happened, are reunited at the family house. The event that links the two timelines is the visit of their English cousin Sophie Mol, and a tragedy that follows, bound up with Ammu’s forbidden love for Velutha, a gifted carpenter from the Paravan caste, considered untouchable.

Roy reveals the outcome early and spends the rest of the book circling back to show how and why it happened. That structure turns the novel into a slow, painful unfolding rather than a mystery. The central theme is what Roy calls the Love Laws, the rules about who may be loved, and how, and how much. Caste, class, gender, colonial history and Kerala’s communist politics all press down on the characters.

The language is the book’s most distinctive feature. Roy writes partly through the twins’ eyes, inventing words, splitting and joining them, capitalising phrases, reversing spellings and repeating motifs like refrains. It is inventive and often very funny, and it captures the way children see the adult world.

Readers sometimes find the style overwhelming, and the fragmented, back-and-forth chronology takes effort, especially early on. The novel deals with abuse, violence and incest, and its climactic scenes are deeply distressing.

But few novels make you feel so keenly how history, prejudice and family pressure can crush a single, fragile love. Roy did not publish another novel for twenty years, and this one remains her landmark.