The God of Small Things

 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 321 pages.

This novel is very hard to describe. It is about twins Estha and Rahel, and dances between their lives in the present and the week their childhood was destroyed in the state of Kerala in the year 1969. It is a book about love and family, but in ways that are as often painful as beautiful, and it is hard to know what else to say about it without flattening the experience of reading it. 

It was an excellent book, and I definitely think people should experience it. Normally books that feel like they're built around one big event the author refuses to tell us tend to annoy me, because they tend to feel contrived and a little cheap, but this book is definitely an exception for me. I suspect it's because it feels less like the author is concealing from us the big terrible thing that happened and more like Estha and Rahel can't bear to think about it. The novel is graceful and engaging, and the prose is absolutely lovely (the phrase "a viable, dieable age" has been popping into my head at random for days now). I definitely plan on picking up another book by this author at some point.