Recommendations
Books Like The God of Small Things
What to read after The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) is one of the most celebrated debut novels of the twentieth century — the Ipe twins in Kerala, India, and the summer of 1969 when the Love Laws were broken. If you were drawn to its non-linear structure, its lush linguistic invention, and its examination of how caste and gender determine which loves are permitted, these novels offer the same depth.
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The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across three time periods connected by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway — the same non-linear structure, the same interest in the specific texture of lives lived under constraint, the same sense that a catastrophe in the past shapes everything in the present
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
1,001 Indian children born at the moment of independence who have supernatural powers — India's other great postcolonial novel; the same linguistic inventiveness as Roy, the same formal ambition, the same sense of personal and political history as inseparable
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A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Four people sharing an apartment in Bombay in 1975 during Indira Gandhi's Emergency — the most emotionally devastating novel about caste and poverty in Indian literature; the same examination of the Love Laws (here, the laws of caste) and their cost, written with even less mercy
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The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
A retired judge in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong and his orphaned granddaughter — Booker Prize winner 2006; the same examination of how empire's legacy shapes individual lives, the same sense of class and caste as forces that determine what lives are possible
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner — the same non-linear approach to a historical trauma, the same sense that what happened in the past cannot be approached directly, the same prose that makes the unbearable visible through extreme linguistic precision
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Seven generations of the Buendía family in fictional Colombia — the novel Roy herself has named as an influence; the same mythological sense of a family shaped by forces larger than themselves, the same lyrical prose, the same sense of time as circular rather than linear
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A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth
A widow in post-independence India looking for the right husband for her daughter — a vast, leisurely novel about Indian society in the 1950s, the same attention to caste and class and the Love Laws, in a more realist register and on a much larger scale
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The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
A letter from an Indian entrepreneur to the Chinese Premier — a Booker Prize winner told from the perspective of a low-caste driver who murders his employer; the same examination of India's caste system as a force that determines who may and may not rise, told from within the experience of the lowest class
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