The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

An author worth waiting two decades for

Financial Times

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

Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first

Financial Times

A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion

Washington Post

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness confirms Roy's status as a writer of delicate human dramas that also touch on some of the largest questions of the day. It is the novel as intimate epic. Expect to see it on every prize shortlist this year

The Times

Heartfelt, poetic, intimate, laced with ironic humour...The intensity of Roy's writing - the sheer amount she cares about these people - compels you to concentrate...This is the novel one hoped Arundhati Roy would write about India

Daily Telegraph

Teems with human drama, contains a vivid cast of characters and offers an evocative, searing portrait of modern India

Tatler

A beautiful and grotesque portrait of modern India and the world beyond. Take your time over it, just as the author did

Good Housekeeping

This intimate epic about India over the past two decades is superb: political but never preachy; heartfelt yet ironic; precisely poetic

Daily Telegraph

She is back with a heavyweight state-of-the-nation story that has been ten years in the making

Daily Mail

Arguably the biggest publishing event of the year

Financial Times

Fantastic. The novel is unflinchingly critical of power, and yet she empowers her underdog characters to persevere, leaving readers with a few droplets of much-needed hope. It's heartening when writers live up to the hyperbole that surrounds them

Hirsh Sawhney

A kaleidoscopic story about the struggle for Kashmir's independence

Washington Post

A sprawling, kaleidoscopic fable about love and resistance in modern India

The Guardian

A passionate political masterpiece

Times Literary Supplement

Compelling, musical, cinematic... [A] genuine poignancy and depth of emotion. Her gift is for the personal: for poetic description [and an] ability to map the complicated arithmetic of love and belonging . . . The Ministry of Utmost Happiness manages to extract hope from tragedies

The New York Times

The follow-up we've been longing for - a poetic, densely populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy. From its beginning, one is swept up in the story... With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with humour and transcendence

Vogue