Synopses & Reviews
Southern India, 1969. Here, Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, twins 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 man her children love 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.
"Dazzling ... remarkable... A novel that turns out to be as subtle as it is powerful". -- 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 re-read it. Immediately. It's that hauntingly wonderful. -- USA Today