The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
In Kerala, the wrong people love each other. Everything breaks.
For you if
you want to understand caste as something that operates on bodies and hearts rather than just social structures
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In Kerala in 1969, two things happen that cannot happen: a touchable woman loves an untouchable man, and a child dies. Roy moves between 1969 and 1993, slowly revealing how the Love Laws — the rules about who can love whom and how much — destroyed two families. She writes in a prose that loops back on itself, that circles the unspeakable thing from every angle before saying it. The most formally inventive Indian novel after Midnight's Children and the most politically specific — this is Kerala, this is caste, this is the Communist Party, this is the Catholic church, this is what the Love Laws do to actual bodies. Booker Prize winner.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- India • South Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Indian author
- Topics
- caste system in india
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