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The God of Small Things was written by Arundhati Roy, who was trained as an architect, is married and a mother of two children, writes film scripts and engages in social and environmental projects as a political activist. Her first and to date only novel, published in 1997 on the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, won the Booker Prize in the same year and has enjoyed an immense worldwide success, having been translated in about 40 languages. The multifaceted novel appeals to a wide audience because it is about hope and disillusionment in a family over three generations in “exotic” Southern India, and because it is mysterious, historical, poetic, postcolonial and postmodern all at the same time. However, its great popular and academic acclaim has not gone without criticism. Marta Dvorak argues that the novel,...

Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams appeared in 1794, fifteen months after the publication of Godwin's landmark Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. The preface to the novel, which was omitted from the first edition, articulates its broad continuity with Godwin's critique of government in Political Justice:

It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of...