The God of Small Things
SynopsisPlot
The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest.
Story
About this book
Set in the southern Indian state of Kerala in 1969, The God of Small Things follows the fraternal twins Estha and Rahel as their comfortable family life fractures after the arrival of their young cousin, Sophie. Arundhati Roy's debut novel moves between the children's view of that year and events decades later, circling back again and again to a single catastrophic day.
The novel is rooted in the hierarchies of caste and class that shape daily life in Kerala, a state where communist organizing and older forms of power sat in tension. Roy uses the twins' close attention to language, detail, and sensation to build a voice that is precise and unsettling at once. Small domestic moments carry heavy consequences, and the children understand only part of what the adults around them are doing.
Roy published the novel in 1997, and it won the Booker Prize that year. Reviewers have set her prose beside Faulkner and Dickens. It reads at once as a family chronicle and as political drama, and it opened a career that has since included fiction and political essays written for readers well beyond India.
