Arundhati Roy had a huge success with her first book back in 1997, it won the Booker Prize and the love of the nation as it stayed on the bestseller list for month after month.But since then she has remained frustratingly silent. So hearing a second book from her was finally about to be published the literary world was spun into a frenzy!

The sneak peeks of the cover and the blurb encouraged the frenzy – here’s the blurb “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spools 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. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her.”

Unfortunately it just doesn’t live up to the hype. The characters are all extraordinary and deeply interesting and the book itself is more like a collection of short stories woven together. But as interesting as the characters and the stories are, the writing lets them down. Roy fails to create an emotional resonance, there is plenty of description and a great sense of setting but she doesn’t spend enough time describing how the characters feel and what they want.

Sadly it’s only 3 Bites from me and an admission that I left half the book on my plate.

For me this eagerly anticipated second novel lacked the focus of The God of The Small Things.

This new book spread its net wide to encompass different layers of society within India as well as the differing regions. It was certainly an eye-opener for me in terms of Indian politics, corruption and the warring religions and castes

" Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg :its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence"

The novel was at its most absorbing when it dealt with Anjum. Anjum is born a hermaphrodite and it adopted by the Hijra community. She eventually sets up an unconventional guest house above her family graves (Jannat) and takes in people that on the fringes of society of Delhi.

Other strands of the story follow characters linked to the conflict in Kashmir.

Sometimes this book seemed to lose direction and I felt bewildered and confused. in terms of the different characters and strands of plot.

Is it an enjoyable book? I don't know? I really enjoyed parts of it but maybe nor the "whole" Is it an important book? Yes in terms of holding up India to scrutiny at a turbulent time and maybe a crossroads historically . That is how I think this book will be judged- in the long term as a "barometer" of Indian life.

I would hesitate to reread this whereas I would certainly reread God of The Small Things. However it was an intense and I felt that the author had poured her very soul into writing it.

I, like many people, have heard of the success of Roy's The God of Small Things from twenty years ago. It's been on my mental longlist of books to read since before Goodreads existed. Perhaps it was a mistake to put it off and opt for Roy's newer release instead, but all I can say is my expectations have significantly lowered after reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

At first, I thought the story was slow, dense and hard to follow. It took me a couple hundred pages of squinting hard to see the truth: there is no story.

These kind of books have a special place in the heart of a certain type of reader. A reader who puts beautiful, complex writing over plot and emotional pull; a reader who doesn't mind looking back over almost 500 pages and realizing very little has happened, even if it was told with pretty language.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness essentially follows two main characters in South Asia - Tilo and Anjum - the former is dragged into the center of an independence movement, while the latter is intersex and living among ghosts. However, there is a confusing mess of characters introduced throughout the book and I found it hard to warm to anyone. It is set across the span of many years, through the partition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but these times of tremendous upheaval and horror were narrated coldly.

The book is just very difficult to enjoy. It feels deliberately intellectual and lacking in personality. Not only is there a sea of forgettable characters, but the book zips quickly between past and present, third and first person, with almost no dialogue to separate the huge paragraphs of dense description. The book constantly has a foot in several tangents about spiritual anecdotes, diatribes, history lessons and various monologues, each of which went on far too long. When it finally came back to the main issues, it took me a while to get back on track.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a book without a plot that simply explores the perspectives, past and present, of many characters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's also not the kind of book I enjoy reading. It even feels disjointed, almost like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. I feel like The God of Small Things is going to be on my TBR a lot longer.

Well worth the long wait. A chaotic blend of anger, love, hope and heartbreak.

A novel rich in style and opinion but scarce in narrative or interest.

I found this book long and rambling. If I had not got it from Netgalley I do not think I would have finished it. It seems to be lots of stories and lots of characters put together in the hope it makes a book. I felt the magic of the setting just got lost.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a long and sprawling novel that seems to cover a vast swathe of current political issues, seen through the lens of modern Indian society.

We open with the story of Anjum, an intersex woman who identifies as female despite being brought up as a boy. She finds others in the same position and joins a community with them in Delhi’s old town. But gradually, she branches out on her own and forms her own community of oddballs and misfits, hanging out in a graveyard. Much of the mis-fitting seems to stem from religious and caste based prejudice.

Then the story shifts to Kashmir and the struggle between Islam and Hinduism as it escalates into full-on war. We meet a different cast of characters, one of whom, Tilo, an architect and activist, is to be the lynchpin of the Kashmiri part of the book. However, Tilo’s central role is not immediately obvious and emerges almost by default as other characters fall away.

This is a difficult book with a cast of hundreds, multiple story lines and themes jostling for attention. All with lengthy asides drawing on literature, poetry, political invective and spiritualism. And there are whole sections that are so esoteric they are almost unintelligible. And the Tilo and Anjum sections of the novel never integrate. They don’t even try to integrate. It is as though multiple sections of various incomplete novels have been gathered and bound together.

At a conceptual level, it conveys the chaos of India. Individual scenes are very evocative – whether that is in a bustling market, a protest outside Jantar Mantar or in a cinema turned torture centre in Srinigar. But as a story telling exercise it just doesn’t work. There is little plot and negligible character development. It feels like a series of scenes created and loosely linked to illustrate political points. That’s something that might work in a shorter work, but after so much of the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, it has long outstayed its welcome.

Nevertheless, the book clearly has something. Normally a work this disjointed would have been abandoned relatively early in the piece. But the more lucid pieces do command the attention and the novel does create a level of intrigue to see where it all might be heading.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the latest offering from the author of The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy is a staggeringly lyrical writer and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a prime example of this.
I love the descriptive nature of Arundhati Roy’s writing, the way it manages to describe the scene and characters without going overboard. I felt like I could see and hear the sights and sounds described on the pages of the book. For example,
“At the 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.”
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was a pleasure to read, not least because of Arundhati Roy’s gift for character development. I have rarely seen character development like it, she weaves together a million little threads without any being diminished.
When we first meet the protagonist, she is described as living in the graveyard ‘like a tree.’ She sleeps on a threadbare Persian carpet which she folds away and hides during the day.
“For company she had her steel Godrej almirah in which she kept her music – scratched records and tapes – an old harmonium, her clothes, jewellery, her father’s poetry books, her photo albums and a few press clippings that had survived the fire at the kwabgah.”
Anjum was the fourth of five children and her parents were delighted to be getting their first boy, until the baby was unswaddled.
That was when she discovered, nestling underneath his boyparts, a small, unformed, but undeniable girlpart. She reacted with fear and shock, unsure how she would love a baby like that.
“In Urdu, the only language she knew, all things, not just living things but all things – carpets, clothes, books, pens, musical instruments – had a gender. Everything was either masculine or feminine, man or woman. Everything except her baby.”
The word for people like Anjum is ‘Hijra.’
Anjum’s mother decided to keep the secret to herself and bring Anjum up as a boy. She didn’t even tell her husband the truth.
Growing up Anjum loved to sing and everyone agreed he had a sweet singing voice. As puberty dawned, and his voice broke, Anjum felt increasingly at war with his own body.
“One Spring morning Aftab saw a tall, slimhipped woman, wearing bright lipstick, gold heels and a shiny, green satin Salwar Kameez…He wanted to be here.”
Shortly after this Anjum left home and decided he wanted to live as a woman.
One of the main selling points of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the way Anjum and the other characters have their stories shown against the geopolitical landscape of India. These parts of the book were as important for me as the characters’ story.
“Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbours turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sang each other’s songs. The walled city broke open. Old families fled (Muslim). New ones arrived (Hindu) and settled around the city walls.”
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a story about pet goats, two babies and Saddam Hussain…what more could you want?

What a beautiful piece of modern literature, Incredibly important! Marvelously written with political and social issues as a common theme. The setting is accurate, while the characters are larger than life. It goes into present day India criticizing politics and the economy. Castes, religion, race and gender are all discussed. There are many lessons of significant value that readers will take from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. At times the plot lags in favour of getting major points across, though the book is still entirely enjoyable. Highly recommend!

It has been a long time coming. This is Arundhati Roy’s second novel published twenty years after her Booker prize winning The God of Small Things. Was it worth the wait? Yes.

It is a sprawling tale of the dispossessed and the marginalised of Indian society with a love story thrown in for good measure. It takes us from Delhi to Kashmir where Kashmiris are fighting for independence and India and Pakistan are fighting for control of the country.

We first meet Anjum (born Aftab) who is a hijra which is Hindu for hermaphrodite. She lives with other hijras in a sort of commune in Delhi. This is until she witnesses a massacre of Hindu pilgrims on a visit to a Gujarati shrine and the reprisals against Muslims. At this point Anjum takes up residence in a graveyard and the novel moves on before returning to her later in the book.

Then we meet Tilo, first as a feisty and secretive student and then as an activist and the men who fall in love with her. Here we move into the conflict in Kashmir and the atrocities committed by all sides.
The novel ends with Tilo taking up residence with Anjum in the graveyard.

I really enjoyed the first part of the book. It then seemed to lose its way a little and I found some chapters overlong and unnecessary. This was particular the case in the long drawn out section with Tilo and her dying mother. It did however get back on track so I’m glad I stuck with it.

I really liked the characters of Anjum and Saddam Hussain they came to life for me. Tilo was well drawn if a little distant but that reflected her character. The brief flashes of humour were welcome in a book which deals with ‘mans’ inhumanity to ‘man’.

I was left with a desire to find out more about Kashmir and its history.

Thanks to the publishers for an ARC via NetGalley although it was a shame that some of the numbers in the book, for example dates, were replaced by little squares.

This is a very difficult book for me to review. The writing was beautiful and there's no doubt that the author is a master of storytelling. However, I can't say that I enjoyed it as the plot line was disjointed and kept straying off. Objectively, it was an insightful and powerful novel that touched upon so many topics - religion, love, politics... I guess it's just wasn't for me.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the arc.

As I ploughed my way through this sprawling, disjointed novel I was reminded of Muriel Spark’s famous judgement on a novel she had read – “For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like.” I’m afraid I don’t like this sort of thing – for much the same reasons I don’t enjoy Salman Rushdie, with whose work this latest novel from Arundhati Roy seemed to have some affinities. An epic story with a large cast of characters, diverse storylines, a cacophony of voices, a multitude of themes and issues – all set against a chaotic background of contemporary India and Kashmir. Religion, politics, nationalism, identity, caste – it’s all here, but with no compelling narrative to tie all the strands together, which I found disorientating. I did enjoy the first part of the book, which concentrates on Aftab, who later becomes Anjum, born intersex and who becomes a Hijra amongst a community of transgender women. That episode I found interesting and insightful. But after that the story became too rambling and discursive for me, and frequent journalistic passages drew me away from the narrative. Essentially this just wasn’t a book for me, and I find it hard – and perhaps unfair – to try to judge it. It didn’t work for me, I wasn’t seduced by it and I skimmed much of the central portion. A marmite book perhaps….

Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize winning debut The God Of Small Things was sensuous, atmospheric, emotionally powerful book. India’s caste system was the motivator of the plot, and a backdrop of Keralan Communism bled through it. The book was saturated with politics, but it mainly served to inspire, sustain and contextualise the story - while at the heart of it were the troubled twins and their tragic mother.

20 years later, here comes The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Fans of Small Things will no doubt flock to read Roy’s latest offering, perhaps looking to experience, once again, the heady emotional high of her debut. This time, though, India’s politics is at the heart of the book, and the characters’ stories merely the thin blanket that wraps it. But it’s a very finely woven blanket and the book’s political heart is fascinating, enlightening and revealed with Roy’s almost breathtakingly luxuriant writing.

On the surface, The Ministry is about is about Anjum - born with both male and female genitals she becomes one of Old Delhi’s Hijra community - an ancient tribe as out of place in a modern LGBTQ-literate society as they are in the Duniya - the real world of the rest of India. As she comes to terms with her identity, and its challenges, over the years, her longing to be a mother drives her decisions. It’s also about the baby she finds abandoned, and the other woman who claims the baby as her own: Tilo - originally an architecture student from a Christian community in Kerala who is drawn, through love, deep into the conflict in Kashmir. These characters are beautifully drawn and constantly surprising, written with shots of brilliance, but tied with only with the barest of glimmering threads to the true content of the book.

Because The Ministry of Utmost Happiness isn’t really about Anjum and her graveyard home, or Tilo and her painful relationship with her mother. It’s about Kashmir. It’s about the nature of sectarian conflict; what starts it, how it escalates, and who can win it. It’s about lynchings. About inter-religious tensions, power struggles and abuses of power. It’s about the inefficiency of politicians, the limits of democracy and the challenges of protest. It’s about the Union Carbide gas leak, in Bhopal, that killed thousands upon thousands of people. It’s about violence, and how it lives under the surface in India. As Roy describes it: “Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and diverse as we are continue to coexist - continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine.” It’s about that yolk.

Roy tries to contain that whole vast landscape of struggle in this book. And, to fit it all in, she sometimes indulges in detailed deviations that have only the most tangential connections to the main story. In one scene Anjum arrives at Jantar Mantar - a fascinating old observatory - where India’s many protest groups gather, like a shop window of troubles. Roy takes us on a lengthy tour, protest by protest, struggle by struggle. For a reader who simply wants to follow the story home, it can be frustrating. It feels as if she’s taking advantage of a certain assumed indulgence on the part of the reader, a well-earned faith that reading with patience will be worth it in the end.

And IS it worth it? For those who were hypnotised by the druggy, lusty heat of The God of Small Things, the dry intellectual challenges of this may be a bit much: If The God of Small Things was Kerala, then The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Delhi. But, if you’re interested, even fleetingly, in the politics; then yes. It may be a mind-expanding insight into the Indian political landscape, but its true triumph is in how brutally, magnificently, unflinching it is. The descriptions are unflinching: you can feel India’s blood and sweat and hunger ingrained in the world she’s describing. During the sacrifice of a water buffalo for Bakr-Eid, the blood flows down the busy street while children “stamped their feet softly in the red puddles and admired their bloody shoe-prints.” And its moral stance is unflinching: it feels as if Roy knows better and shames us all a little, for our misperception or misguided enthusiasms. She describes some well-off protesters joining a popular cause and experiencing: “the adrenaline rush, the taste of the righteous anger that came with participating in a mass protest.”


It is sobering and admonishing, but never has it been so captivating and enjoyable to be scolded. Because at the heart of it is her amazing writing. Including this line - one place where The Ministry really does echo her debut: “They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle - the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him. And then of course there were the other parts - the ones that wouldn’t fit.”

For those just here for the story it gets ★★☆☆☆, for those who want Roy’s politics in a more digestible form than her non-fiction ★★★★☆

Remarkable glorious writing - utterly compelling from the start, and an amazing journey through individuals and wider issues

I loved the first part of this book but found the second - more political part - much more difficult and less enjoyable. There also seemed to be some parts which were seemed to be experimental for experiment sake rather than moving on the story. Needed a good edit in places. I wish it was better. I loved the Delhi descriptions as it really did bring the city to life.

In Old Delhi, the hijra Anjum sets up her life in a graveyard. She is joined by a former mortuary worker who calls himself Saddam Hussein. Another outcast joins them, Tilottama, and there is a baby who seems to have appeared from nowhere and belong to nobody. This group’s fates are narrated through time and in different places of India and Kashmir. All of the characters face struggles due to the political situation, either protest in Delhi or the long-lasting conflict in the Kashmir region and thus portray India in a very special way - India of the people at the fringe of society.

Arundhati Roy’s second novel might be the most awaited book of 2017. It took her twenty years to write it after her debut success “The God of Small Things” and the yardstick has been set very high for the successor. Admittedly, I struggled with the novel which is mainly caused by the plot’s structure. The story is only in party narrated in a chronological way, other sections are meandering and at times the different characters and setting were not always easy to link with each other for me. Second, the novel is highly political and if you are not familiar with India’s recent history and political struggles, a lot might be lost for you as a reader of this novel (at least I assume so).

Nevertheless, there were also a lot of aspects that I really liked. Arundhati Roy definitely is a master of words. In subtle ways she finds possibilities of expressing what happens and thus adding second or even third meanings. When Anjum has set up her small guest house in the graveyard, she is regularly inspected by municipal officers who are not “man enough” to chase her away. Considering Anjum’s situation as hermaphrodite, this is quite interesting to observe. Then her permanent resident who calls himself “Saddam Hussein”, another outcast who chose this name in admiration for the former leader’s courage in the face of death. Or when Tilo ponders about some men killed in a car accident and their fate and whom this actually concerns since they would have died anyway and wonders about “how to unknow certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know” (pos. 3095). Summarising the stat’s situation in political upeheal best are the following two quotes:
“There were rumours and couterrumours. There were rumours that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumours”. (pos. 3681) and “Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.” (pos. 3835)
How can one survive in this situation, especially as an outcast? You have to fight for yourself and accordingly, it is the two women who become strong and leaders – quite a surprise in the country’s strict caste system.

The insight in how India’s society works is for me the most remarkable aspect of the novel. Not considering it as a whole, there are many stories within the novel which give you an understanding of the country’s culture and are thought-provoking.

This was the first book I read about India. It wasn't a good experience.

I only know very little about Indian politics and even less about Roy's views. But for me, a foreign reader to this subject, this book felt less like fiction and more of a history lesson.

While the book introduces many characters, it focuses mainly on two. A trans, Anjum, an outcast adopted by a whorehouse and Tilottama, a riot victim. Naturally, the book's events take to Kashmir, the center of conflicts.

The writing style was magical and lyrical at first. Until we had too much going on and at the same time nothing. What I mean is we were introduced to many characters. The narrative switched between 1st and 2nd person, from the past to present. Even though everything made a lot more sense by the end, I was left bored and unimpressed most of the time. Too many descriptions and so little dialogue to keep the plot moving, which was barely existent. I received this book 2 weeks or so before the release date and was unable to read it before last week after I finished my exams. Naturally, I would be excited to read as much as I can and thus fast, but this book took me so long to finish that I barely made it that I surpassed the release date. I haven't read Roy's other book so I had 0 expectations and even then, it managed to disappoint me. I'm not someone who minds slow paced books but we barely had anything going on here. I liked how she wrapped everything and the theme she handled (and that's why the 2 stars) but it could've been easily done in less than 300 pages. I couldn't connect with the characters no matter how much I wanted to. I couldn't care. Yes, I was sad (the violence, the rape...), yes some things made me happy but any book could've done that.

I will still read her other book, The God of Small Things since everybody said it's way better but I'm not so excited anymore. Do I recommend this book? I'm sorry but not really, unless you are a fan of Roy and share her views.

Inevitably this book is going to be compared with The God of Small Things, I think people will either love or hate it, I personally found it to be a deeply textured and thought provoking read. I do not generally précis books in my reviews and this book is so densely packed with brilliantly observed characters that to attempt to distil them down would be a disservice to the skilled weaver of tales that is Ms Roy.

What I can say is this is a deeply personal book, much as Small Things was before it and that despite certain political leanings, that it is a heartbreaking and interesting examination of conflicts that remain even into modern day between Pakistan and India through the prism of several normal folk who are on the fringes of society. It is a vibrant story, written in beautiful prose even when approaching matters of violence, discrimination and degradation.

Ultimately I left the story feeling uplifted and positive about the human condition and equally entertained and educated about a volatile and intriguing area of the globe.

My initial reaction to it was one of disappointment. After a good beginning I struggled with it because there is so much description, so little plot and such a large cast of characters. At times I was on the verge of abandoning the book, but then first one episode and then another and another held my imagination and I read on. Now, though, I’m glad I finished it as the ending is clearer and more understandable than the middle, where quite frankly I was for the most part bewildered.

It’s a difficult book to read firstly because of its structure (or lack of structure) and secondly because of its content. It’s not a straight narrative, as it moves backwards and forwards in time and place and between different narrators, both in the third and first person, all of which makes it a disjointed and fragmentary book. There are stories within stories, some of which at first appear to be totally unconnected to anything else, but looking back I can see how they become interwoven into the whole (I think).

I preferred the beginning, the story about Anjum, to the rest of the book but by the end it’s as though Roy decided to bring all the strands together, to come back full circle to Anjum and the community she established in the old graveyard in Delhi. Maybe it’s because she spent 10 years or so to write it. For more details about why it took over 20 years for Arundhati Roy to write her second novel see this article, Fiction Takes Its Time in The Guardian.

I’m sure that I didn’t pick up all the political and cultural references, but the issues surrounding caste, nationalism, gender and religious conflict are clear. It’s a book about love and loss, death and survival, grief, pain and poverty. There are outcasts, the hijras – transgender individuals, rape victims, addicts and abandoned babies; and there is a lot of violence, massacres, beatings, tortures and rapes. It’s a heartbreaking book, which doesn’t spare the details. I was relieved to finish it.

I do not think that this was the book for me. I had to stop about 30% in. It was a wide ranging novel of India. its characters, and its history, but I found it very slow going and I just couldn't finish it. The author had a wonderful way of creating the setting, her writing is wonderfully descriptive and emotive, but these glimpses of the beautiful images she created were all too infrequent. The rest of the novel was overly slow and pages would pass with very little actually happen.
I'm sure this novel will appeal to many others, but unfortunately it just wasn't for me.