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SCMP Reporter

The title of author Arundhati Roy's first novel - The God of Small Things - is deceptive. It has not yet been published, but has already made her a millionaire.

The GBP500,000 (HK$6 million) European rights paid for the book has caused a sensation in India and abroad and has put Indian writers in a hot literary league of their own.

Nine of Britain's biggest publishing houses bid for the British rights to the 36-year-old former architecture student's book. HarperCollins won, paying GBP150,000. The rest of the money comes mainly from European countries including France, Belgium and Sweden. Just a few months ago no one in the international publishing world had heard of Roy or the manuscript she had quietly put together over the past four years.

She did not even allow her film-maker husband, Pradip Krishan, to see it until it was finished.

'All this came as a complete surprise, I didn't know how the publishing world worked or how rights are sold or that I needed an agent,' Roy said at her New Delhi home yesterday.

Although only a handful of people have read the work - which is due for release in India in February and elsewhere next June - The God of Small Things is already one of the most talked about literary events of the decade.

'Not since the buzz around Vikram Seth's The Suitable Boy has a novel so captivated English editors and the chequebooks of their bosses,' commented Picador's editor-in-chief Peter Straus. 'The God of Small Things is different from anything that has come out of India of late. Unlike most novels that find their way to the West, it has a universality that has little to do with its setting.' Roy refuses to discuss the contents of the book and gives media interviews reluctantly. Clearly uncomfortable about the marketing hype surrounding the book and its astronomical advance, she would prefer people to read it first and then judge its literary merits.

'To describe it in a few lines reduces it,' she said. 'Telling a story is the simplest way of presenting a complicated world. I can't simplify that any further.' Roy is only prepared to reveal that the novel is set in her home state of Kerala, which she describes as 'the only place where the great religions of the world - Marxism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam - thump together and rub each other down'.

 The novel reportedly covers a wide spectrum of politics, caste and religion.

Roy's literary agent, David Godwin, the former head of publisher Jonathan Cape, calls it a 'complicated story and there is no compromise to the reader'.

Roy said: 'The much sweeter thing than all this hype about the money is that it doesn't seem to matter if this book is going to be read in Finnish or French. For me writing is an act of generosity. This book seems to have crossed so many barriers.' 



Book unpublished but author becomes a millionairess