The God of Small Things

Non-linear trauma narrative, love destroyed by social hierarchy, the past that will not stay in the past — the closest structural and thematic parallel in world literature

Postcolonial India as subject, political allegory in family narrative — but Roy is more intimate, less pyrotechnic, more directly engaged with caste

Caste, political violence, and survival in post-Independence India — Mistry is darker and more linear where Roy is lyrical and structural

Childhood trauma, class and social hierarchy, the impossibility of undoing a formative act of cowardice — a more melodramatic version of Roy's core moral problem

Family saga across generations, political history embedded in domestic life, non-linear time — but García Márquez mythologizes where Roy insists on the physical and political

Love suppressed by social hierarchy until it is too late, retrospective narration from a position of loss — structurally different but thematically a close match