The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060977493
Publisher: HarperCollins

Arundhati Roy has written that she "spent the early years of [her] childhood in [her] grandmother's pickle factory in Kerala [as] a formidable curry-powder packer and pickle-label sticker." From the pickle factory, Roy went on to boarding school and the Delhi School of Architecture, where she took an honors degree. She then proceeded to Goa, where she sold cakes on the beach and refashioned old sarees into beach shirts. After working as a research assistant at India's National Institute of Urban Affairs and studying monument and historical-site restoration in Florence, Italy, she returned to India, where she met her future husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, and acted ("unmemorably," she insists) in Krishen's film, Massey Sahib.

Her "first professional writing assignment," the commentary for a documentary on rhinoceroses, led to TV and feature film screenplays. After being dismissed by India's Channel Four because of an angry critique of one of its films, Roy turned to teaching aerobics and writing a novel, spending four and a half years in a remote mountainside house. The end result, The God of Small Things, garnered rave reviews around the world and received England's illustrious Booker Prize-the first time an Indian writer has been so honored.

Responding to the question "What next?" Roy has said, "I don't know what I'll do next . . . At the end of The God of Small Things, I was drained, finished.. . .Everything I know is in that book. I have nothing to say about myself beyond that. I have no plans for a follow-up." Readers can only hope that this writer of "distinctive voice and vision," (Newsweek), will give them a follow-up to what the Washington Post Book World called "the strongest kind of novel."

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