Name: Elizabeth 

Reading: The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy 

Why did you want to read this? I love Roy’s tidal, circular writing, and the textures of her eccentric characters. This was brought out vividly when reading – you might hear me stumble over some of her dizzying, alliterative sentences. When I first read the novel, I was a teenager drawn by the John Berger epigraph, and I remember being spellbound at her use of structure: the overlapping of multiple seasons, memories, people, and breathless monsoon days. I had never read anything like it, and have not since.  

How did you record yourself? I was lucky to get access to a small recording studio – so it was a weirdly VIP experience! I was cocooned from the outside world save for getting water from the small kitchen – where like Roy’s characters I was met with the lives of small creatures, could hear birds making nests in the old roof.