Humane and sensuous, beautifully told, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts.
How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
With stories told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent, as it braids together an aching love story and a decisive remonstration with characters who are as indelible as they are tenderly rendered.
We meet Anjum, a hijra, as she unrolls her threadbare carpet on the floor of the cemetery in Old Delhi she calls home, while many miles away, we encounter the captivating Tilo, and the three men who in turn are captivated by her. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight, while in a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks.
Roy entwines these stories together to reveal people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love--and most especially, by hope. Beautiful in its telling, vivid in its detail, and breathtaking in its scope, with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has reinvented what a novel can do and can be.
About the Author
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.
What People Are Saying
“Truly, this is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinent’s most brutal villains.” Ron Charles, Washington Post
“The first novel in 20 years from Roy, and worth the wait: a humane, engaged near fairy tale that soon turns dark—full of characters and their meetings, accidental and orchestrated alike to find, yes, that utmost happiness of which the title speaks.” Kirkus (starred review)
“Ambitious, original, and haunting . . . a novel [that] fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of headlines . . .essential to Roy’s vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A masterpiece…Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, García Márquez, and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit…. A tale of suffering, sacrifice and transcendence—an entrancing, imaginative, and wrenching epic.” Booklist
"With its insights into human nature, its memorable characters and its luscious prose, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is well worth the 20-year wait.” Time
“One of the effects of reading Roy is heightened, nagging awareness . . . [t]o read Roy is to build a sense of wonder” Globe and Mail
"... what is so remarkable is [Roy's] combinatory genius… [the] scenes of violence are hallucinatory... In fact, [she is] practicing... magic realism, which... among other things, [is] a means of reporting on political horror without inducing tedium.” The New Yorker
“To say this book is ‘highly anticipated’ is a bit of an understatement. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be a welcome gift for those who’ve missed Roy’s dazzling fiction.” Cosmopolitan’s 11 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down This Summer
“It’s finally here! Fans of The God of Small Things have been waiting for Roy’s next novel, and it doesn’t disappoint. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is big, both in physical heft and in ideas. It features an unforgettable cast of characters from across India whose stories are told with generosity and compassion.” Vulture Summer Books Preview
“A novel that takes its readers into the abyss of poverty and patriarchy, thereby narrating the sordid uses of power and the agony it unleashes. . .it is an inward contemplation of a master storyteller on the times and surroundings she is living in.” The Times of India
“This intricately layered and passionate novel, studded with jokes and with horrors, has room for satire and romance, for rage and politics and for steely understatement…[I]t is exuberant, page-turning, and sometimes even frolicsome—though a frolic that can flip abruptly into something like despair...Like Dickens, Roy can plunge us into intimacy with a character within a few pages; she can also sustain the mystery of character across the entire span of the plot…This is a work of extraordinary intricacy and grace, as well as being fuelled by savage indignation. It is also a work that feels dangerous to read, even to those far from scenes described. There is no space left for easy objectivity in this challenging novel. It gives it its cutting edge.” Prospect
“A stunningly beautiful novel that wills another world to emerge from our collective darkness. Weaving the experiences and aspirations of India’s most marginalized peoples into perfect prose, Roy unveils complex characters possessed by a desire to invent new worlds even in dark times. In an era when the West is sensing the prescience of authoritarian rule, Roy’s novel is instructive: it illuminates the intelligent, critical, often rebellious perspectives of peoples belonging to a vast Indian underclass.” Maclean’s
"Roy’s novel is deeply political and offers the opportunity for audiences to engage with complex history in an accessible and compelling way." Open Canada
“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which marked her long-awaited return to fiction. . .is a book just as good, if not better, than The God of Small Things, and that is enough reason to celebrate.” The Express Tribune
“a magnificent, sweeping work about a divided India.” The Straits Times
"lyrical and life-affirming." Irish Examiner
“A story of unbinding love, mystery and thrill, uncertainty and perplexity, ambivalence and confusion that brings to life a whole lot of tales and stories from a host of origins…. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an unforgettable tale, which touches you on many levels of mind and heart and invites you to unweave its rich texture thread by thread and share its loss, love, horror and hope.” Daily Times (Pakistan)
“[A] wonderfully woven narrative…. This is the kind of book that makes one feel that life is worth living.” Sabiha Huq, The Daily Star
“After a 20-year-long wait, Arundhati Roy presented us with her second book, a mesmerising novel that deals with some of the most brutal atrocities of modern Indian history . . . The web of narratives that Roy has woven makes for an interesting read.” Yourstory
“Roy elucidates the conversation around power and diversity in a way that no other author does. This book is more than just one of the best protest novels ever written, standing up to reading after rereading. It is also the ultimate love letter to the richness and complexity of India — and the world — in all its hurly-burly, glorious, and threatened heterogeneity.” The Los Angeles Review of Books