The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

From the Hardcover:
   The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt).
  When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river...

"The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again."

   The God of Small Things made its way around numerous book lists a few years ago and it sounded interesting. I got more than I thought I would from it. It is beautifully written, I fell in love with the sentences. The story took a little getting into, it jumps seamlessly in time. After I became used to the style I was able to concentrate on Rahel and the memories she was sharing. This book has politics, forbidden love, and family drama.
   I also learned a little about the caste system in India that I was somehow ignorant of before reading this book. I love a book that introduces me to new things.
   I'd recommend this book to someone who loves the feel of words, much like Winter's Tale, but this book is less of a time commitment at 321 pages compared to Winter's Tale's 768.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

From the back of the book:
"Mark Helprin's magical masterpiece will transport you to New York of the Belle Epoque, to a city clarified by a siege of unprecedented snows. One winter night, Peter Lake - master mechanic and master second-storey man - attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks it is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between a middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying of consumption. It is a love so powerful that Peter Lake, a simple uneducated man, will be driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature."

"We learn that justice may not always follow a just act, that justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected, that a miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain."

Winter's Tale is immensely more than the synopsis implies. It is not just a love story between Peter Lake and Beverly Penn, for quite some time Peter Lake isn't in the book (which disappointed me because I had just began to adore him when he disappeared.) There are so many different lives, over many years, that weave together to form Winter's Tale. There is an element of very subtle magic to this tale, a fog or mist people disappear into and a town you must have been to in order to visit, a town not on any maps, and a white horse of legend that presents himself to Peter. This whole book I was wondering where it was going. The author's writing coaxed me through most of the 748 pages, Mark Helprin writes beautifully. However, the last 150 were very tough to make it through.

I would not recommend this book to a casual reader, but if you love the feel of magnificently written words this could be the book for you.