by Arundhati Roy (India)
Paperback ISBN: 9780241303986
Pages: 445

Beginning in a graveyard in Old Delhi and widening into a sweeping story of modern India, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness brings together lives shaped by love, loss, violence, caste, religion, and political upheaval. At its center is Anjum, a hijra who creates an unconventional home among the dead, and Tilottama, whose life becomes entangled with the long conflict in Kashmir.

Rather than following a single straight path, the novel moves across places, times, and communities, gathering people who have been pushed to the margins and insisting on their humanity. Expansive, ambitious, and often heartbreaking, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is both a political novel and a deeply intimate one, asking how tenderness, grief, and hope can survive in a fractured world. Reviews have frequently highlighted its kaleidoscopic structure, moral seriousness, and emotional range.

New York Times Best Seller
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson Group

About the author

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist and essayist. She studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and became internationally known with her first novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Alongside her fiction, she has published widely on politics, social justice, and contemporary India, and her essays have appeared in major international outlets. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published twenty years after her debut novel, marked her long-awaited return to fiction.

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