How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
?No.
By slowly becoming everything.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.
Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love – and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.
Product Details
- Hardcover: 464 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Random House India (6 June 2017)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 067008963X
- ISBN-13: 978-0670089635
- Product Dimensions: 29 x 20 x 3 cm
About the Author
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and was a bestseller in more than thirty languages worldwide.
Since then Roy has published five books of influential non-fiction essays that include The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), and Broken Republic (2011). She has raised profound questions about war and peace, the definitions of “violence” and “non-violence”, about what we think of as “development”, “democracy”, “nationalism”, “patriotism” and indeed the idea of civilization itself.
Roy is a trained architect. She lives in New Delhi.
Review
ummers 20 Must-Read Books If you want to know the world behind out corporate-sponsored dreamscapes, you read writers like Arundhati Roy. She shows you what s really going on. --Junot Diaz, in Vogue
‘Worth the 20-year wait. . . The unmissable literary read of the summer’ Time
‘Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first. . . An author worth waiting two decades for ' Financial Times
'A masterpiece. . . Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, García Márquez and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit. . . An entrancing, imaginative, and wrenching epic' Booklist starred review
‘The great pleasure of reading Ministry is its intricacy, the profusion of lives woven together into a massive tapestry’ Business Standard
‘What is so remarkable [in Ministry] is her combinatory genius’ New Yorker
‘A fierce and fabulously disobedient novel. . . Roy’s novel is this decade’s ecstatic and necessary answer’ Boston Globe
‘Infused with so much passion—political, social, emotional—that it vibrates. . . Roy’s exquisite, furiously passionate prose is that rare instrument up to the task of telling this shattered story’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘A novel that demands and rewards the reader's concentration, this is a dazzling return to form' Independent
'Intricately layered and passionate, studded with jokes and with horrors. . . This is a work of extraordinary intricacy and grace' Prospect Magazine
'A great tempest of a novel . . . [it] will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' Washington Post
