Recommendations
Books Like The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Roy fiction, postcolonial Indian novels, and books about love that transgresses social law
If The God of Small Things moved you with the lyrical intensity of Roy's prose and the devastation of the Love Laws, these eight works share its account of love destroyed by social hierarchy, its non-linear engagement with trauma, and its sense of the small things that bear witness when the large things destroy.
- 1
Buy on AmazonMidnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel — the lyrical, politically engaged novel of Indian independence that Roy's work is in dialogue with; both use magical and non-linear narration to approach the violence of history.
- 2
Buy on AmazonA Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Mistry's 1995 novel of four people in India during the Emergency — the caste and political landscape that Roy explores, in a realist mode that makes the suffering of the powerless equally concrete.
- 3
Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the same lyrical intensity, the same non-linear engagement with trauma, the same sense of a love destroyed by the social order; the American parallel to Roy's account of what the Love Laws cost.
- 4
Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's 1937 novel — an American woman's love that transgresses her community's social expectations, told in lyrical vernacular prose; the Harlem Renaissance predecessor to Roy's Kerala lyric.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
Desai's 2006 Booker Prize-winning novel of India and the Indian diaspora — the colonial and postcolonial landscape Roy explores, in the Himalayas and New York, with the same sense of the cost of belonging to more than one world.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Arundhati Roy
Roy's 2017 second novel — a wider political canvas (Kashmir, Delhi, the transgender hijra community) but the same lyrical intensity; essential Roy.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's 1989 novel of an English butler who cannot acknowledge the feelings that would have changed his life — the British parallel to Ammu's situation; both are accounts of love destroyed by the loyalty to a social code.
- 8Buy on Amazon
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih
Salih's 1966 Sudanese novel of postcolonial desire and violence — another account of what happens at the intersection of colonial and indigenous social codes, where forbidden desire produces tragedy.
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