The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Novel

Description

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE 2018

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE and THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

‘At magic hour; when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke…’

So begins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s incredible follow-up to The God of Small Things. We meet Anjum, who used to be Aftab, who runs a guest-house in an Old Delhi graveyard and gathers around her the lost, the broken and the cast out. We meet Tilo, an architect, who although she is loved by three men, lives in a ‘country of her own skin’ . When Tilo claims an abandoned baby as her own, her destiny and that of Anjum become entangled as a tale that sweeps across the years and a teeming continent takes flight…

Reviews

“A great tempest of a novel. . . . Will leave you awed.” —The Washington Post

“Staggeringly beautiful. . . . Once a decade, if we are lucky, a novel emerges from the cinder pit of living that asks the urgent question of our global era. . . . Roy’s novel is this decade’s ecstatic and necessary answer.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Powerful and moving. . . . Infused with so much passion—political, social, emotional—that it vibrates. It may leave you shaking, too.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Roy writes with astonishing vividness.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Magisterial. . . . The Ministry of Utmost Happiness works its empathetic magic upon a breathtakingly broad slate.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“A fiercely unforgettable novel about gender, terrorism, Indian’s caste system, corruption and politics. . . . A love story with characters so heartbreaking and compelling they sear themselves into the reader’s brain.” —USA Today

“Thrilling. . . . [Roy’s] luminous passages span eras and regions of the Indian subcontinent and artfully weave the stories of several characters into a triumphant symphony.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A lustrously braided and populated tale.” —Vanity Fair

“Roy’s second novel proves as remarkable as her first. . . . Through [the characters’] archetypal interactions, juxtaposed with Roy’s glorious social details, you will have been granted a powerful sense of their world, of the complexity, energy and diversity of contemporary India.” —Financial Times

“Epic in scale, but intimately human in its concerns, the long-awaited story dazzles with its kaleidoscopic narrative approach and unforgettable characters.” —Elle

“The novel weaves the personal and the political with powerful results. . . . Roy turns her lens outward to examine India’s rich but violent history and the catastrophic lingering effects of Partition.” —Esquire

“A riotous carnival, as wryly funny and irreverent as its author.” —The Guardian

Author Biography

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize and has been translated into more than forty languages. She also has published several books of nonfiction including The End of Imagination, Capitalism: A Ghost Story and The Doctor and the Saint. She lives in New Delhi.