
The God of Small Things
A BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatisation
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $18.88
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
By:
-
Arundhati Roy
About this listen
A full-cast BBC Radio dramatisation of Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel—plus bonus interview with the author.
Arundhati Roy's debut novel The God of Small Things took the literary world by storm, winning the Booker Prize in 1997. It went on to sell over six million copies in 40 languages, and was named as one of the BBC's 100 'Novels That Shaped Our World' in 2019.
Set in Kerala in both the present and 1969, it tells the compelling tale of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, whose lives are shattered by the 'Love Laws' that dictate 'who should be loved, and how. And how much'. As children, they are inseparable: so close, they think of themselves as one person. But when they are just seven, everything changes. A terrible tragedy occurs, and, drawn into its devastating repercussions, they are forced apart.
Twenty-three years later, Rahel has moved to America and made a new life. But when she hears that Estha has been 're-returned', she travels to Ayemenem to be with her long-lost, broken brother. As painful memories come flooding back, the heartbreaking events of the twins' childhood gradually unfold, and through flashbacks and flash-forwards, the secrets of their desperately dysfunctional family are revealed....
A powerful story of forbidden cross-caste love and what a community will do to protect the old ways, this enthralling, atmospheric drama stars Yasmin Wilde, Richard Sumitro and Shaheen Khan, and features a haunting soundtrack by internationally renowned musician Nitin Sawhney. Also included is a bonus episode of Radio 4's Bookclub from 2011, in which Arundhati Roy talks to James Naughtie about what was then her only work of fiction. Taking questions from the audience, she discusses the novel's themes and symbolism, and reveals how her training as an architect helped her plan its complex, multi-layered structure.
Production credits:
Written by Arundhati Roy.
Adapted by Tanika Gupta.
Original music by Nitin Sawhney.
Produced by Nadia Molinari.
Cast:
Rahel—Yasmin Wilde
Estha—Richard Sumitro
Young Rahel—Jatlnder Purewal
Young Estha—Shakeel Ahmed
Ammu—Thushani Weerasekera
Velutha—Paul Bhattacharjee
Sophie Mol—Poppy Rush
Chacko—Vincent Ebrahim
Baby Kochamma—Josephine Welcome
Mammachi—Shaheen Khan
Inspector—Matthew Raadrawl
Vellya—Badi Uzzaman
Kochu—Adlyn Ross
Margaret—Slobhan Finneran
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 12th-23rd July 2004.
Bookclub: Arundhati Roy—The God of Small Things
With James Naughtie and Arundhati Roy.
Produced by Dymphna Flynn.
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 2nd October 2011.
©2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2022 BBC Studios Distribution LtdListeners also enjoyed...
-
Kindred
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Kim Staunton
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.
-
-
The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us
- By Jefferson on 12-05-10
-
Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
-
-
A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
-
These Precious Days
- Essays
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
-
-
Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Disordered Cosmos
- A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
- By: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky.
-
-
Stunning
- By Amazon Customer on 04-05-21
-
The God of Small Things
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family.
-
-
Worthy Booker winner!
- By Saman on 08-10-17
By: Arundhati Roy
-
The Enchanters
- A Novel
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrated by: Craig Wasson
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle
-
-
Ellroy is tired
- By butwhatdoIknow on 11-29-23
By: James Ellroy
-
Kindred
- By: Octavia E. Butler
- Narrated by: Kim Staunton
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.
-
-
The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us
- By Jefferson on 12-05-10
-
Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
-
-
A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
-
These Precious Days
- Essays
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
-
-
Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Disordered Cosmos
- A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
- By: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky.
-
-
Stunning
- By Amazon Customer on 04-05-21
-
The God of Small Things
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family.
-
-
Worthy Booker winner!
- By Saman on 08-10-17
By: Arundhati Roy
-
The Enchanters
- A Novel
- By: James Ellroy
- Narrated by: Craig Wasson
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle
-
-
Ellroy is tired
- By butwhatdoIknow on 11-29-23
By: James Ellroy
-
Love in the Time of Cholera
- By: Gabriel García Márquez
- Narrated by: Armando Durán
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people's lives together for more than half a century. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral....
-
-
When love is sick
- By Vira on 09-02-13
-
Victory City
- A Novel
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sid Sagar
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga—“victory city”—the wonder of the world.
-
-
Rushdie never fails to engage.
- By Tom on 02-23-23
By: Salman Rushdie
-
Zikora
- A Short Story
- By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Narrated by: Adepero Oduye
- Length: 1 hr and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Zikora, a DC lawyer from Nigeria, tells her equally high-powered lover that she’s pregnant, he abandons her. But it’s Zikora’s demanding, self-possessed mother, in town for the birth, who makes Zikora feel like a lonely little girl all over again. Stunned by the speed with which her ideal life fell apart, she turns to reflecting on her mother’s painful past and struggle for dignity. Preparing for motherhood, Zikora begins to see more clearly what her own mother wants for her, for her new baby, and for herself.
-
-
Great quick listen.
- By Tally on 11-09-20
-
Barbara Pym: A BBC Radio Drama Collection
- Some Tame Gazelle, No Fond Return of Love, Crampton Hodnet & More
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Miriam Margolyes, Hannah Gordon, Samantha Bond, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.
-
-
A Wonderful Find
- By Martha Alston on 05-24-22
By: Barbara Pym
-
Decameron
- A BBC Radio Drama Adaptation of the Renaissance Classic
- By: Giovanni Boccaccio
- Narrated by: Terry Jones, John Finnemore, Samuel Barnett, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes—love, sex, religion, fate, morality—resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Monty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
What listeners say about The God of Small Things
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 01-23-24
Brilliant , beautiful and brutal
Magnificent writing , every sentence crafted with exquisite care . A masterpiece that must be read and digested.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!