The God of Small Things

From the Publisher:

Southern India 1969. Here, armed only with the invincible innocence of children, Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, who loves by night the same man her children adore by day...their blind grandmother, who plays Handel on her violin...their beloved uncle, A Rhodes Scholar pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher...their enemy, an ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt...and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth. But when their English cousin and her mother arrive for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in an instant, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

"Offers such magic, mystery and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It's that hauntingly wonderful."
-- USA Today

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

"A splendid and stunning debut."
-- Washington Post Book World

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

"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."
-- New York Times Book Review