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  • Published: 1 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241980774
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017




A new novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of the monumental God of Small Things

'How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.'

In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people that attended her funeral. And in the Jannat Guest House, two people who've known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around one another as though they have only just met.

Here is a cast of unforgettable characters caught up in the tide of history. Told with a whisper, with a shout, with tears and with laughter, it is a love story and a provocation. Its heroes, present and departed, human and animal, have been broken by the world we live in and then mended by love -- and for this reason, they will never surrender.

  • Published: 1 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241980774
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464
Categories:

About the author

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997, and two collections of essays: The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. She lives in New Delhi, India

Also by Arundhati Roy

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Praise for 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

The first novel in 20 years from the Booker-prize winning author of The God of Small Things

Penguin