The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

A sort of miniature family saga, this Booker prize-winning novel follows twins Estha and Rahel and members of their extended family - grandmother Mammachi, her Anglophile son Chacko and daughter Ammu and embittered grand-aunt Baby Koch amma - as they head towards self-immolation. Roy creates an intensely detailed and almost sweatily physical version of middle-class India, and just about everybody from John Updike to the Canberra Times has hailed it as a masterpiece, but the writing is immensely self-conscious and, at times, veers uncomfortably close to fey.