Book Awards Reading Challenge

The story mostly focuses around dizygotic (from two eggs) twins Estha and Rahel who have no last name due to their mother being undecided at the time whether she would use their fathers name or her fathers name. It is set in India mostly and follows their family members when their white cousin Sophie Mol comes to visit them (the three are children at the time) and their uncle, her biological father. She is found drowned in the river after only being with them for a couple of weeks.

The story jumps around quite a lot in time narrating the events leading up to Sophie's arrival, later death and the far reaching consequences over twenty years later for the twins and their family. The storytelling reminded me in style of Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children in the way it wasn't a linear tale and the way the characters were developed. The book it most brought to mind was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It tells of love, who you can love, how much and in what way. A strange novel which I can't work out if I enjoyed or not. The final short chapter was beautiful concerning the twins mother, but I didn't like how Roy left the story of the twins. In places it was quite a slow and difficult read, but some of the language really stayed with me. I think this one needs some time dwelling on it before I can properly move on.