Set in Kerala, India, in the late 1960s and mid-1990s, the novel follows fraternal twins Estha and Rahel as a visit from their glamorous half-English cousin sets in motion a chain of transgressions across lines of caste, class, and family loyalty. Interweaving the twins' childhood with their adult return to the family home, Arundhati Roy traces how one forbidden love and one afternoon's tragedy reshape the destinies of an entire household. Told in lyrical, circling prose that approaches its central wound gradually before finally naming it, the book is as much about the machinery of history and social rule as it is about a single family's private catastrophe.
Books mentioned in The God of Small Things (5)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare: “Baby Kochamma, who had been put in charge of their formal education, had read them an abridged version of The Tempest by Charles and Mary Lamb. (Elsewhere the twins recite Ariel's song from it: "Where the bee sucks, there suck I / In a cowslip's bell I lie.") Normalized to Shakespeare's play, the canonical work being retold; in-text the…”
Lochinvar by Walter Scott: “"Today I would like to recite to you a poem by Sir Walter Scott entitled 'Lochinvar.'" She clasped her hands behind her back.”
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic's version of A Tale of Two Cities.”
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: “At night Ammu read to them from Kipling's Jungle Book.”
The Reader's Digest World Atlas by Reader's Digest Association: “Ammu took down the heaviest book she could find in the bookshelf—The Reader's Digest World Atlas—and hit him with it as hard as she could. Kept as a specific, singular named reference work (per project convention allowing works like Merck Manual/Brewer's); credited to its publisher since no individual author is given.”
Books that mention The God of Small Things (1)
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy: “That's what I said at the front of my first novel, The God of Small Things, which I dedicated to her.”