You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Arundy Roy,

winner of this year's Booker Prize

for her novel, The God of Small Things.

It's her first novel.

It's published by Random House.

The book was published almost to an immediate sense of surprise.

The word spread from the earliest book auctions to its publication in America,

which was heralded by a special and beautiful reader's edition,

at which time I've read it.

I've been wanting to talk to Arunditiroi for, well, since I read the book, and I'm very

glad to have you here.

Thank you, Michael.

I wanted to ask you, first of all, the book has a very unusual structure. It's as if the whole thing pours from an empty or a set of empty halls.

There's the empty hall vacated by a boat in which the children's mother and her lover

make love once the boat has been dug up.

There's the empty hole from which the twins come from their mother into the world.

...