[Shapiro is an American journalist. In the following review, she offers praise for The God of Small Things, in particular Roy's playful use of language and development of eccentric characters.]

After you turn the last page and start thinking back on The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's glowing first novel, you find you're still deep inside it. You can feel against your skin the lush vines and grasses, smell the pickled mangoes and sweet banana jam, hear the children singing as their uncle's car carries them home to disaster. Disaster was waiting from the start, for the novel begins with a little girl's funeral. Sophie Mol, almost 9, has drowned; and her twin cousins and their mother are mysteriously, horribly implicated. The details don't fall into place until the end of the book. But making our way there, we move through a landscape of sensory imagery so richly evocative that, like the 7-year-old twins, we seem to have lived the tragedy long before we can understand it.

Roy, 37, grew up in Kerala, the state in southwest India where her novel is set. She's been through architecture school and written the screenplays for two highly regarded Indian films; and now she proves herself to be an extraordinary novelist. Inevitably she will be compared with Salman Rushdie, whose novels (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses) were the first to carve out a definitive place in English fiction for books about India by Indians. Indeed, hardly a season seems to go by now without a talented young writer emerging from the Subcontinent with a new book and a bid for Rushdie's mantle. It's true that like Rushdie, Roy plays often and delightedly with language, loves songs and jingles and doggerel, and scatters capital letters where they're bound to startle. Some of her characters, too, are very much in his vein, off-beat and emotionally gnarled. The twins, for instance: forcibly separated after the tragedy, they grow up with jagged edges that never heal. Eventually the boy, Estha, stops speaking and the girl, Rahel, stops feeling.

But Roy is no disciple of anyone: a distinctive voice and vision rule this book. Her sentences, though drenched in unforgettable metaphor, are perfectly chiseled. "Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha," she writes. "It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue … He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past."

Sophie Mol's death is only one of the disasters spawned by history, love and human cruelty here, yet The God of Small Things is never grim. It's way too full of life for that. Much of the narrative is filtered through Rahel's perspective, and the girl's imagination gives a wonderfully magic buoyancy to the page. At an airport where she's behaved so badly her only allies are the cement kangaroos that serve as trash receptacles, Rahel glances at them as the family leaves. "Cement kisses whirred through the air like small helicopters," writes Roy, and the pleasure she takes in such imagery is contagious. This outstanding novel is a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading.