The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

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The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they 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, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it."

Book Details

Publisher: Random House Trade
Publish Date: Dec 16th, 2008
Pages: 352
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.22in - 0.79in - 0.58lb
EAN: 9780812979657
Categories: • Literary• Coming of Age• Women

About the Author

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She has worked as a production designer and written the screenplays for two films. She lives in New Delhi. This is her first book.

Praise for this book

"Dazzling . . . as subtle as it is powerful."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It's that haunting."--USA Today

"The quality of Ms. Roy's narration is so extraordinary--at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple--that the reader remains enthralled all the way through."--The New York Times Book Review

"A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does."--John Updike, The New Yorker

"Outstanding. A glowing first novel."--Newsweek

"Splendid and stunning."--The Washington Post Book World