ABOUT
THE BOOK

Ostensibly the tale of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, The God of Small Things begins with a funeral and ends with a meeting between two lovers. The funeral is the culmination of events that started with a love affair and the novel tells us how the characters got there, and the terrible damage they suffer along the way. Children of a divorced and embittered young mother, the twins wend their way through the minefield of family relationships: their mother’s wild moods, their uncle Chacko’s affection, their great-aunt Baby’s destructive jealousy, and Velutha, a young untouchable carpenter and member of the Communist party who becomes their friend and, crucially, their mother’s lover. Familiar, yet also exotic, to the Western reader, The God of Small Things is invigorated by the Asian-Indian influences of culture and language. Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi. She was trained as an architect and has written two screenplays: The God of Small Things is her first novel and won the 1997 Booker Prize.