Reading Order
The God of Small Things Reading Order
The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy is the most celebrated debut novel of the 1990s — a Booker Prize-winning account of a family in the Syrian Christian community of Kerala, India, centered on the forbidden love between a Syrian Christian woman, Ammu, and Velutha, an 'Untouchable' carpenter and Communist sympathizer, and the catastrophic consequences of that love for everyone around it. Roy tells the story in a non-linear fashion, moving between 1969 (when the central events occur) and 1993 (when Ammu's twin children Rahel and Estha, now adults, return to Ayemenem and piece together what happened), with a lyrical, punning, self-conscious narrative voice that is one of the most distinctive in contemporary fiction. Roy, who was trained as an architect and is primarily known as a political essayist and activist, wrote The God of Small Things over four years. The novel is deeply engaged with the political and social landscape of Kerala — the Syrian Christian community's own caste hierarchies, the Communist Party's contradictions, the colonial legacy, the 'Love Laws' that dictate who can love whom — but its emotional core is personal and specific: the love between two people whom everything around them insists cannot love each other, and the small things (a child's toy boat, a blue-black beetle, a moth) that stand as witnesses to what the big things — history, politics, caste, religion — destroy. The novel's ending, in which we finally see the night Ammu and Velutha spent together before his death, is one of the most tenderly written in contemporary fiction.
Where to start
The God of Small Things — the non-linear structure is part of the meaning; read through even when the chronology is unclear; the emotional logic becomes the structural logic.
Complete The God of Small Things Book List
- 1Buy
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy·1997·The novel — Ammu, Velutha, the twins Rahel and Estha, and the Love Laws of Kerala. - 2Buy
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy·2017·Roy's second novel — twenty years later; a wider political canvas; the same lyrical prose. - 3Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a formerly enslaved woman and the ghost of her daughter — the same lyrical intensity, the same sense of a love destroyed by the social order. - 4Buy
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry·1995·Mistry's novel of the Emergency in India — the caste and political landscape of the same subcontinent, in a more realist mode. - 5Buy
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai·2006·Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel of India and the Indian diaspora — the colonial and postcolonial landscape Roy explores, in the Himalayas and New York. - 6Buy
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie·1981·Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning novel of India's independence — the lyrical, politically engaged novel of postcolonial India that Roy's work is in dialogue with. - 7Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's novel of forbidden love and selfhood — the American predecessor to Roy's lyrical account of a love that transgresses social law. - 8Buy
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini·2003·Hosseini's Afghan novel of a forbidden friendship and its consequences — a simpler but emotionally powerful account of how social hierarchy destroys personal love.
The God of Small Things — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The God of Small Things about?
The God of Small Things is centered on the love affair between Ammu (a divorced Syrian Christian woman from a respectable Ayemenem family) and Velutha (an 'Untouchable' carpenter and Communist Party member who works for the family). The affair, which takes place in 1969, is discovered by Ammu's mother Mammachi; Velutha is falsely accused of raping Ammu and beaten to death by the police; Ammu is sent away and dies young; and Ammu's twin children Rahel and Estha bear the trauma of what they witnessed as children into their adult lives. The story is told in 1993, when Rahel returns to Ayemenem and she and the now-mute Estha piece together what happened. The novel also contains a second death — the accidental drowning of their British cousin Sophie Mol — which adds to the twins' guilt and to the circumstances that destroy Velutha.
What are the 'Love Laws' in The God of Small Things?
The 'Love Laws' are Roy's name for the social codes — caste, class, religion, gender — that dictate 'who should be loved, and how. And how much.' The novel's central argument is that these laws, which are presented as natural and inevitable, are in fact social constructs that produce enormous human suffering by forbidding connections between people that their own feelings and humanity would otherwise make possible. The love between Ammu and Velutha is forbidden by the Love Laws (a Syrian Christian woman cannot love an 'Untouchable' man), and the consequences of their love — Velutha's death, Ammu's exile, the twins' trauma — are the concrete cost of those laws. Roy is not arguing that breaking the Love Laws is easy or without consequence; she is arguing that the laws themselves are what is monstrous.
Why does The God of Small Things use non-linear narration?
Roy's non-linear narration — moving between 1969 and 1993, often revealing what happened before explaining how — serves several purposes. Most importantly, it mirrors the novel's central psychological insight: that the twins Rahel and Estha have organized their entire adult lives around the events of 1969, which they have partly suppressed and partly distorted, and that understanding what happened requires the same circuitous approach to trauma that the novel enacts. The structure also allows Roy to create dramatic irony: we know early that Velutha will be killed and Sophie Mol will drown before we fully understand the circumstances, which gives the scenes leading up to those deaths a quality of doomed tenderness. The non-linearity is also simply part of Roy's style — her language is resistant to conventional plot chronology because it is organized by association and image rather than cause and effect.
What is the significance of Kerala in The God of Small Things?
Kerala is not merely a setting in The God of Small Things — it is the novel's political and ecological landscape. Kerala was the first state in the world to elect a Communist government (in 1957); it has high literacy rates and relatively progressive social policies compared to much of India; but it also has its own entrenched caste hierarchies and its own religious communities (Syrian Christians like Roy's family, Hindus, Muslims) with their own internal politics. Roy uses this complexity to show the contradictions of progressive politics in practice: the Communist Party that should have protected Velutha, as an 'Untouchable' and a Party member, in fact conspires in his death, because the Party's officials are also members of a society with its own caste loyalties.
What should I read after The God of Small Things?
After The God of Small Things, Roy's second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) is the obvious next step. For the tradition of Indian postcolonial fiction it belongs to, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (1995) are essential. For lyrical fiction about forbidden love and its consequences, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God are the most illuminating American parallels. For the Kerala and South Indian setting specifically, Kamala Das's memoirs and poetry provide a different perspective on the same cultural world Roy describes.
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