Novel by Arundhati Roy set in Ayemenum, a village in India. It is the story of the children, "two-egg twins," Estha and Rahel. Going back and forth between the past (when the twins were seven years old) and the present (they are now adults), it pieces together what happened when their cousin Sophie Mol came to visit with her British mother. It is also the story of the twins' single mother and her affair with an Untouchable man, Velutha. Still another layer is the history of their family, the parents' and the grandparents' lives. It is a story of guilt, of innocence, and of social injustice. The worth of the book is not only in its content, but in the way it is written, complex and exquisite to read. It is a Booker Prize winner. Written on the cover is the phrase: "Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one."