Arundhati Roy · 1997 · river

Arundhati Roy's 1997 Booker winner. In the lush backwaters of Ayemenem in Kerala, twins Rahel and Estha live through a single catastrophe whose consequences ripple across decades - a drowning, a forbidden love across caste lines, a family's disgrace. From the pickle factory by the river to a fateful trip to Cochin and Rahel's return from America, the small things shape everything.

1. 1
   Assam

   Ammu escapes Ayemenem at eighteen by marrying a tea estate manager in Assam, and the twins are born there - and when the marriage turns drunken and violent she takes them and goes home, which her family does not forgive.

2. 2
   Ayemenem

   The Ayemenem House holds Mammachi, blind and running Paradise Pickles out the back, Chacko home from Oxford, Baby Kochamma nursing a lifetime's grievance, and Ammu with two seven-year-olds she was not supposed to bring back.

3. 3
   The Meenachal

   Behind the house the river is the children's country, and Velutha's - the untouchable carpenter who mends their things and is the only adult who treats them as people. It is also where Sophie Mol will drown.

4. 4
   Cochin

   The family drives to Cochin to collect Sophie Mol from the airport and to see The Sound of Music at Abhilash Talkies - where a man at the refreshment counter makes Estha do something he will never tell anyone about.

5. 5
   The History House

   Across the river stands Kari Saipu's abandoned house, where the police find Velutha asleep and beat him to death in front of the twins - and where a Heritage Hotel will later sell the same history back to tourists as decor.

6. 6
   Madras

   Two weeks after the funeral Estha is Returned - put on the Madras Mail with a packet of tomato sandwiches and sent on to a father he barely knows, which is the moment the twins' childhood is ended for them.

7. 7
   Calcutta

   In Calcutta, with a father who has given up the Assam tea estate and remarried, Estha stops speaking - not suddenly, but the way moss spreads, until there is nothing at all he is prepared to say to anyone.

8. 8
   Boston

   Rahel is expelled from school after school, loses her mother at eleven, drifts through architecture college and a marriage to an American, and follows him to Boston - a life conducted for twenty years at a distance from itself.

9. 9
   Ayemenem

   In 1993 Rahel comes home at thirty-one because Estha has been re-Returned, and finds the house damp and Baby Kochamma in front of a television - and the twins, separate and silent for twenty-three years, are in one room again.