The God of Small Things is mainly about damaged love. It's about the exploding intensity of love in the most elementary of relationships—between mother and son, man and woman, brother and sister. Ways of loving, you might say, in which the seeds of madness, delusion, withdrawal, destitution and savage death were sown from the start. Or as Rahel, the novel's narrator, points out more than once in her excessive habit of capitalising certain words for emphasis: "It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago...that it really began when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved. And how much." Roy marks out the well-explored territory of love and death as her own, and then introduces themes that have been mined deeply in novels elsewhere. The magical bonding between twins, for instance. A rich comic view of precocious childhood impinging on an adult world. Torpor and tragedy in the deep south. The force of nature as personified by the watchful river, a presence that is benign, liberating and destructive. However, this is not to suggest that Roy's work is in any way derivative or her talent anything less than original. But if books, like people, have genealogies, then hers (it could be pure chance) harks back to famous novels by writers from the American Deep South: a child's world disordered by adult truths in the muscular narratives of William Faulkner and Harper Lee, violence invading the steamy small towns in Carson McCullers' tales or the half-expected incest erupting between the fatally attractive twins in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.