The God of Small Things
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
A New York Times bestseller
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the 2017 Voice Arts Award for Classics
A BookRiot Pick for Books about Sisters
A Bustle Pick of 12 Modern Books That Will Become Classics
An Electric Literature Pick of Books about the Connection between Twins
A Kirkus Reviews Pick of Books You Should Have Read by Now
A New York Public Library Staff Pick of Favorite Books of the Last 125 Years
A London Times Pick of the 50 Best Novels of the Last 100 Years
The New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize–winning novel about an Indian family in tragic decline that introduced the world to the voice of Arundhati Roy
Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published twenty years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist’s moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).
When their English cousin and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
Praise