This amazing first novel won the prestigious Booker Prize. It is a work of fiction but it reads more like a memoir as the author peels back the layers of fact and fantasy that shroud a mystery from the protagonist's childhood.
Adding to the mystery is the dreamlike drifting back and forth in time, between Rahel's childhood when everything suddenly went wrong and her present when as an adult she returns to her family home in India only to learn her "two-egg" twin has returned.
All the reader really knows until the end is that when the twins were young, their cousin, Sophie Mol came to visit her father and died tragically. The who, what, where, when, how and why is fed to us slowly and poetically. In the meantime we are introduced to a changing India, a country that was/is changing as dramatically a Rahel's family.
Caste, a patriarchal society and political ambition and instability add to the disintegration of the family.
Roy creates beautiful and haunting word pictures. It is more a tragic opera set in India than a book. You smell the filth, swelter in the heat and ache for those who are sacrificed due to their sex or caste.
John Updike who reviewed the book for the New Yorker called it "conscious art."
This is a soft cover edition published by Viking Canada. The copyright was 1997. There is no edition information for this copy. This edition has 321 pages. Condition is once read from non-smoking home. It is in excellent condition.
The hard cover was published by Random House Canada in 1997.
