And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. A richly moving new novel-the first since the authors Booker Prize-winning, internationally celebrated debut, The God of Small Things, went on to become. Together the life stories of Anjum, Tilo and their multitude of friends, acquaintances and enemies. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love – and by hope. Her history of political and social activism underpins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Somehow in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years, Roy outdoes The God of Small Things, and this is largely because it is an even more unsettling, artistic cry against.

It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. How to tell a shattered storyBy slowly becoming everybody.NoBy 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.

The ministry of utmost happiness story