Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

In India, Arundhati Roy writes, "Love Laws" define who should be loved, and how, and how much. Defy these laws and you may lose your life; conform to them and you are sure to lose your soul.
These laws take their toll on Ammu, a young mother and divorcee, who returns with her children to her family home. Life there is poisoned by Baby Kochamma, the ubiquitous aunt whose youthful, unrequited love for an Irish priest has left her bitter, overweight, frightened of the world, and glued to the TV. Baby Kochamma has, by plight of circumstances, conformed to the Love Laws, and lost her soul.
By contrast, Ammu falls in love with Velutha, a gorgeous carpenter employed by the family business. The relationship is sensuous and powerful, but doomed. Velutha is an untouchable; in loving him, Ammu is breaking the Love Laws and publicly disgracing her family.
To preserve the family's reputation, Baby Kochamma trumps up charges that Velutha both raped Ammu and caused the death of a little girl, Baby Kochamma's grand-niece. (Does Baby Kochamma secretly envy Ammu's love for Velutha since her own equally forbidden love for the Irish priest could never bloom?) Velutha is hunted and brutally killed by the police.
Ammu must grieve Velutha's death silently and alone. Broken and embittered, she alienates her own children, is driven from the family home, and, despite desperate efforts and wild dreams of rebuilding a life, dies alone in a hotel. The church refuses to bury her. She is wrapped in a dirty sheet and fed to the incinerator in a crematorium for beggars, derelicts, and police-custody dead. Defying the Love Laws has cost both her and her lover their lives.
The theme is familiar to us gay men. It is echoed in films like Brokeback Mountain, dances like Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, many gay novels, and the lives of untold numbers of gay men like Matthew Shepherd whose love never had the chance to be spent. Like Ammu, many a gay man has grieved the loss of a lover silently and alone.
This story taps into the profound sadness so many of us gay men feel; but it also energizes our resistance to the Love Laws--whether in South Asia or here in the US--that constrict our hearts and crush our spirits.