Key themes
- The small things — the private, the intimate — that the laws forbid
- Caste and the violence of the laws that maintain its boundaries
- The way tragedy repeats and why it cannot be prevented
About this book
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
Published in 1997 as Roy's debut, The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and sold over six million copies. Roy drew on her own childhood in Kerala.
Discussion questions
- The novel is told non-linearly, with the catastrophe known from the opening. How does this structural choice — knowing what will happen before it does — affect your experience of reading toward it?
- The Love Laws determine who is permitted to love whom. How does Roy present these laws — as irrational tradition, as systematic violence, or as something the characters themselves internalise?
- Ammu and Velutha's love is forbidden and ultimately destroyed. Does the novel present their transgression as brave, reckless, or simply human?
- The novel's prose is extraordinarily rich and inventive — capitalising words, inverting syntax. How does this style serve the story Roy is telling?
- Roy spent four years writing this, her only novel for twenty years. What does it do that is impossible in non-fiction?
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