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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017

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About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, written and read by Arundhati Roy.

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018


LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017

NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE 2018

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE and THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'A sprawling kaleidoscopic fable' Guardian, Books of the Year

'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

'A dazzling return to form' Independent

'Intricately layered and passionate, a work of extraordinary intricacy and grace' Prospect

'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


'At magic hour; when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke...'

So begins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy's incredible follow-up to The God of Small Things. We meet Anjum, who used to be Aftab, who runs a guest-house in an Old Delhi graveyard and gathers around her the lost, the broken and the cast out. We meet Tilo, an architect, who although she is loved by three men, lives in a 'country of her own skin' . When Tilo claims an abandoned baby as her own, her destiny and that of Anjum become entangled as a tale that sweeps across the years and a teeming continent takes flight...

20th Century Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Political Romance World Literature Heartfelt Happiness

Critic reviews

She is back with a heavyweight state-of-the-nation story that has been ten years in the making
Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first
A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion
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
An author worth waiting two decades for
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
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)
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
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
Teems with human drama, contains a vivid cast of characters and offers an evocative, searing portrait of modern India
All stars
Most relevant
I loved this book at first. The writing is poetic and evocative and it’s wonderful to hear it read by the author.

However the story gets so co fusing with sooooo many characters. In the end I was listening just to the snapshots of writing having lost the plot completely.

Beautiful writing

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vivid settings, rich and complex characterisation. thoroughly enjoyable. I'll be looking out for more from this incredibly viseral author.

wonderful storytelling

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The plot was pretty simple, which I understood at the end. Tilu or Tilottoma fell in love with a Kashmiri undercover freedom-fighter who are considered to be terrorist by the rest of India. Then the mix of current politics, social tension, hypocrisy and Indian new found love for western consumerism we're all the backdrop of this single plot. A powerful transgender character was created and then abandoned in the middle. As if this was not enough the author bored the audience with unnecessary narrations, repetition of words and elaborate descriptions of trivial things made it a punishment for Arundhati’s fan club as like self who is determined to finish reading/listening to it.
Narration by Arundhati was a bad decision as she was stumbling with her own words, getting tired of her own ’filibustering’ at several sections.
I hope in future this talented author creates something more free-flowing, spontaneous none strenuous for us.

Probably my expectation was too high

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The difficulty with an audio book is that you can't flick back to see how the different timelines in this book fit together, or even, sometimes, remember which one you're in. The number of storylines and characters made it even more confusing. The flat narration by the author also didn't help either, especially as there were pauses in odd places in sentences and sniffs here and there.
All that said, Roy writes beautifully with imagery and descriptions that paint pictures and scenery in your head. I would have struggled reading the book, though, as there is quite a bit of Urdu and other Indian and Pakistani language which as a non-speaker I would just have skipped over, that would have been a pity, as it's lovely to listen to, especially the poetry. I just wish Roy had stuck to writing and let a good narrator read it for us.

beautifully written but confusing

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I found the narrator very difficult to listen to. It spoils my enjoyment of the book a made the story hard to follow. I have found this before , when the author is the narrator. Perhaps it's because they are not professional readers.

Performance spoiled it.

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