Arundhati Roy s phenomenal debut novel, now in paperback, which beat the favourites to the 1997 Booker Prize, and emerged as something of a surprise winner. A witty and magical piece of work, it describes the lives of two twins growing up in a factory in Kerala, southern India amidst an extended and chaotically dysfunctional family. Like a devotionally built temple, The God Of Small Things builds a massive, interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details. John Updike, New Yorker . Roy has intimated that this may be her first and last novel.