All readers must have a favourite book – one they read time and time again and, each time, enjoy in a new way. Pride and Prejudice is one of mine and The God of Small Things another.

It is twelve years since Arundhati Roy’s novel won the Booker Prize (1997). Her story is just as enchanting as ever. We see into the minds of a number of narrators but most of all into the twins, Rahul and Estha, who were forcibly separated after the tragic drowning of their little Anglo-Indian visitor, Sophie Mol.

In a narrative that spans twenty-three years, we meet the family: Mammachi and her self-important son, Chacko. Lovely Ammu, the twins’ mother, Pappachi, violent and embittered and the evil Baby Kochamma the Great Aunt who is poisoning the Ayemenem household as a result of her own early disappointment in love. Rahel has returned to her origins after a life affected by the tragic events of her childhood. We visit her memories as we move with her through the revisited scenes of her childhood.

Ammu’s love for Velutha, an untouchable, is the cause of the heart-breaking central event of the story. We are moved to tears by the dreadful outcome. Yet the telling of this story is delightful and unforgettable. The silent twin and the empty twin win our hearts. This is magical fiction.

This short novel, subtitled We think we know the ones we love, is set in Kentucky and California, first in the forties and fifties, and finally towards the end of the twentieth century.

Andrew Sean Greer movingly evokes the world of Childress, a small farming community, where Pearlie falls in love with Holland Cook. She meets him again on a California beach and declares that she will take care of the dejected ex-soldier. They marry despite his aunts’ warning.

The arrival of a stranger shatters Pearlie’s contented world. The story now moves backwards and forwards, through two wars with conscientious objection and draft dodging as a theme.

Reactions to the execution of Ethel Rosenberg run parallel to the story and we are immersed in the mindset of the US in the post war period. We experience the US from the position of a black, second-class citizen in the fifties. Most of all, we see what it was like to be sexually different.

The end of The Story of a Marriage comes quickly and effectively when Pearlie is with the survivors of the story at the end of the century. Greer shows us, very effectively, how everything has changed.