Rebecca Wait is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The View on the Way Down (2013), The Followers, (2015) and Our Fathers (2020), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and Waterstones Thriller of the Month. Her new novel is I'm Sorry You Feel That Way.
At the Guardian Wait tagged ten of "the most interesting twins in literature. Some display the closeness we might expect, but others are (perhaps more interestingly) beset by mutual resentment and distrust." One entry on the list:
Rahel and Esthappen in The God of Small Things by Arundhati RoyRead about the other entries on the list.
This is a tender, harrowing, gorgeously written (albeit easily parodied) novel of forbidden love in various forms. Twins Rahel andEstha are growing up in turbulent 1960s Kerala in India. So complete is their understanding of each other that “for them there was no Each, no Other”, but a terrible series of events leads to years of separation. The timeline is disjointed, moving back and forth between past and present as the novel explores the devastating consequences of transgressing social laws.
The God of Small Things is among Alex Hyde's top ten mirrored lives in fiction, Saumya Roy's seven unlikely love stories in literature, and Miranda Doyle's top ten books about lies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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