The God of Small Things
First edition
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| Author | Arundhati Roy |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Sanjeev Saith |
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | IndiaInk, India |
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Publication date
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1997 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 37864514 |
The God of Small Things (1997) is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
The God of Small Things was Roy's first book and as of August 2016 is her only novel. Completed in 1996, the book took four years to complete. The potential of the story was first recognized by Pankaj Mishra, an editor with HarperCollins, who sent it to three British publishers. Roy received 500,000 pounds in advance and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.
In 2013, Talkhiyan, a Pakistani serial based on the novel, was aired on Express Entertainment.
The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The temporal setting shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel and Esthappen are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited at the age of 31. Malayalam words are liberally used in conjunction with English. Facets of Kerala life captured by the novel are Communism, the caste system and the Keralite Syrian Christian way of life.
Lacking sufficient dowry to marry, Ammu Ipe is desperate to escape her ill-tempered father, known as Pappachi, and her bitter, long-suffering mother, known as Mammachi. She finally persuades her parents to let her spend a summer with a distant aunt in Calcutta. To avoid returning to Ayemenem, she marries a man who helps manage a tea estate. She later discovers that he is an alcoholic, and he physically abuses her and tries to pimp her to his boss in order to keep his job. She gives birth to Rahel and Estha, leaves her husband, and returns to Ayemenem to live with her father, mother and brother, Chacko. Chacko has returned to India from England (where he studied at Oxford) to run the family's pickle business after his divorce from an English woman, Margaret, and the subsequent death of his and Ammu's father.
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