This is a fascinating book that I hope to finish once I have a physical copy of it.

Roy writes unbelievably well and I was really drawn into the characters and the political background of the story. I loved the subtletly and sharpness with which she portrayed contemporary India. I am, unfortunately, fairly ignorant about India and Roy sparked in me a desire to know more.

Unfortunately, dates did not appear on the ARC and that was quite frustrating. I put the ARC aside and added The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to my Amazon wishlist.

This book is based in Indian Kashmir and India, and set in the present time. It follows characters on the fringe of society; hijras (eunuchs, intersex people, and transgender), outcasts, and the desperately poor, as they navigate their lives around impending war, religion and extreme politics. The narrative changes from varying characters, showing how difficult their lives were and how they came to be in the position they are at, which was confusing to follow at times as I was never sure who's point of view I was reading from. This is a story with many threads, which made for a challenging read; at times it felt rewarding, at others it felt less so. I found that I didn't feel invested in most of the characters, but some of the injustices and violence they endure is heart breaking and stays with you throughout the book.
Arundhati Roy has written a complicated, sometimes beautifully written tale, which I enjoyed but found quite heavy in parts.

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of this book

This is a novel to take your time over. It wasn't written in a rush, and it really feels like it when you're reading it. I might even have to read it again. There are three or four separate stories which end up weaving their way together by the end of the novel.
We look at how Indians treat Anjum and her fellow Hijra, the political unrest in Kashmir and the atrocities that are committed by those who should know better. The latter is seen through the eyes of Tilo and the men who love her: Musa, Biplab and Naga.
A lot of this isn't comfortable reading at all. It is beautifully told, it's frustrating and it is teaching us a lot about what it is to be Indian, Kashmiri, Hijra, female and of a low caste. Some of it is unimaginably sad and seems hopeless; but we are left with a sliver of hope. And we have Anjum to thank for that, I think.
Many thanks to NetGalley for my copy of this beautiful book.

This is a vast sprawling sort of novel with tentacles that go everywhere but also a central nervous system where the various stories make a kind of sense. It begins with someone, Aftab, who lives in a graveyard, a deliberate contradiction, and who then turns out to be half male and half female and essentially hermaphroditic. A series of events and coincidences then draw the novel into a kind of sideways account of the long-running simmering war between India and Pakistan and between Muslim and Hindi, not to forget China and all the major powers with a point of view on what should happen in the region.

It is a pointless dispute, created by the original partition of India, and incapable of resolution. Everyone allegedly wants peace but what they all get is a bloodthirsty and prolonged civil war. There isn't really a good side although I think Roy has sympathies with the Kashmiri nationalists. The landscape is peopled with corrupt people who often do not get what they deserve, victims who certainly don't deserve their fates, insurgents and terrorists who all think they must be right and informers and spies who deserve all they get. It's a mess and the novel reflects it well, often most powerfully through the impact on the helpless.

In the end, there is a vague sense of resolution and the thought that things might get better but there is always a hint that where there is a political vacuum global extremists will still seek to profit. However, the graveyard as a place to live starts to thrive, some of the lost children are found and it becomes more respectable to be a hermaphrodite in a world where the shock and horror headlines are taken by transsexuals.

You might wonder what on earth the book is all about after this! It certainly isn't a detailed historical account of the Kashmiri struggle or a sympathetic novel about how the world relates to people of mixed genders. Perhaps the metaphor is actually straightforward. India and Pakistan is the hermaphrodite child of the Empire, male and female in opposition but unavoidably a single entity, and cutting bits off doesn't change who you are. That might sound like a gloomy prospect but, at times, the book is quite funny and is always well-written.

The other thing to say about it is that it all takes place in that extraordinary mixing bowl of cultures, beliefs, colours and tastes which is how the West likes to think of India. I'm not sure that the idea that anything can happen because this is India works anymore, although it is how we like to think of the place so, sometimes, I got a bit bored of the sensory bombardment but that doesn't detract from what is a quite excellent novel.

This is a fantastic piece of literary fiction. A challenging read at times but well worth the effort. Recommended.

Arundhati Roy has written an extensive, absorbing and heart-breaking story of the personal struggle of a transgender person against prejudice and resentment. Set amongst the internal social turmoil of India and the cultural conflict with Pakistan, Roy’s writing is at times wonderfully poetic and often political.

An eagerly awaiting mother praying for the safe delivery of her son Aftab finds on inspection that he has female parts. Her reactions go from horror wanting to kill herself and her child, to lovingly holding him “while she fell through a crack between the world she knew and the worlds she did not know existed.” He was a Hijra, and she kept it hidden from everyone for a long time. But out it would come and eventually Aftab at 15-years-old enters the Khwabgah (a transgender centre) in Delhi, to live amongst the community of Hijras for more than 30 years. Now known as Anjum she has had a botched operation which removed the male parts and she lives with much more freedom.

India and Pakistan, for many outsiders, are technology-focused global powerhouses yet are such tumultuous, divisive and intractable societies. Their ongoing aggressive relationship to each other has caused conflict that has cost the lives of millions, particularly in the Kashmir region. Internally the religious and caste divides are heart-breaking with the brunt being borne by the lower and minority classes. There are multiple tales in the book with the wonderful array of characters, and they touch on the caste system and the endless killings and retribution. Unnecessary death is a given and it journeys through the narration with us - ever present.

Following a traumatic conflict experience, Anjum returns to Khwabgah only to set in motion the construction of a guest house called Jannat (Paradise), on the site of a graveyard. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness guest house is to become the home to Hijras and all those unfortunates regardless of race, colour, creed or gender. This will be a safe haven where all can freely express themselves without discrimination.

While despair, rejection and abandonment are so prevalent in the novel it is also a story of hope, a story of community caring, and social conscience so you are not alone and unloved. Everything will turn out all right in the end. Because it must. Belief. Love.

I did feel disconnected for large sections of the book and while inspired by the beautiful prose, in the beginning, I wanted to see something more happen, especially in the second half. The book is quite long so perhaps this also added to my angst.

Many thanks to Penguin Books (UK) Publishing and NetGalley, for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review.

I’m doing something a wee bit unusual today. I’m writing a review for half a book. Specifically, I’m writing a glowing review of the first half of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy.

I can’t write a review of the second half because I did not read it. I did not read it because something weird happened halfway through. All the characters I got quite attached to in the first half of the story suddenly vanished. I don’t know where they went.

I tried reading on in the hope they would show up again. They didn’t.

I tried flicking ahead a hundred pages or so, to see if I had something to look forward to. Still no sign of them.

Worse still, the characters they were replaced with weren’t half as interesting or likeable. So I gave up and moved on to another book.

I presume the fault was mine rather than the book, given The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Carnegie Medal and the Women’s Fiction Prize, and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

In defence of this book review, the whole book is 464 pages long. So 50% of the book is still 232 pages which, quite frankly, is a pretty good whack of brilliantly written reading material about India.

And if you’ve made it this far in reading my rather rambling review, I suspect you’ll probably enjoy Arundhati Roy’s rather rambling novel about a rather eclectic bunch of people in a seriously ramshackle city.

I can see how this book can lead to people loving it or hating it. It's a long, at times chaotic tale of many unique characters, of being different and of being an outcast. Then it launches into the chaotic and brutal war in Kashmir, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and the divides within India caused by caste and/or religion. Well I loved it.
What made this book for me are the strange and wonderful characters who come together to live and work in a disused cemetery, setting up a boarding house, funeral home, home for lost souls and a home for damaged animals.
But at the heart of the narrative is the author's anger and frustration with Indian politics.

This is an important book with its beautiful, very talented writing. But, I can see it's not for everyone. It has very specific properties for a specific type of reader. It was on the long list of Women's Prize for fiction, and I can definitely get why it was on the list, because it is amazingly layered, very good writing.
However, if you're looking for a very structured plot to follow in a book, this book is not one of them.. To enjoy this book, you need to relax, feel comfortable with the non-existence of the plot, enjoy the writing and go with the flow. The character building is not significant either. Of course the ideas and the messages are important as well as the writing. Roy is an ambassador of attracting attention to India's problems, political and social. It's grim.
So, I really enjoyed to take a look at many things happening in India without being concerned about any plot of being attached to any character, and I enjoyed the book. The writing is really good.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for granting a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

“They drove over a … flyover as wide as a wheat field, with twenty lanes of cars whizzing over it and towers of steel and grass growing on either side of it. But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one – an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one - , in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival”

“Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living … As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-storey parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains”

The first main character of the book is Anjum (a middle-aged transgender Hirja) now running a form of guest house/funeral parlour/commune in a graveyard in New Delhi. We trace her early life (including her mother’s discovery of her being a hermaphrodite) and then her move to a home for fellow Hirjas, and the eccentric group of people that lived there. There she adopts an abandoned child, but years later after being caught up and beaten (and her travel companion killed) in post-Gujarat revenge riots she moves to the graveyard. Her second guest is an untouchable who names himself after Saddam Hussein and who has vowed revenge on a police officer whose actions lead to the death of his father at the hand of a higher caste mob. An intermediate section features another abandoned baby who appears in the middle of a protest gathering of various hunger strikers and ant-corruption campaigners, Anjum and Saddam decide to adopt her only to find she has been taken away – we find by a Syrian Christian Tilo.

The book then switches across to Tilo and three acquaintances of hers who all met in a college play (which was abandoned after Indira Ghandi’s assassination and the resulting anti-Sikh massacres) – the three are Musa (a Kashmari militant), Naga (a campaigning corruption journalist who over time becomes an agent of the India security forces) and Biplap (an intelligence agent). Lengthy sections are told from first Biplap and then Tilo’s viewpoint and then tell something of Tilo and Musa’s back stories as well as the story of the babies parents.

Tilo and Musa are lovers – but lose touch when Musa moves to Kashmir and marries. His wife and child are killed on their flat balcony when the police open fire on a funeral procession – Musa himself is then called in by the brutal army Major police chief Amrik Singh (a friend of Musa’s collaborator father) and when he refuses to accept Amrik’s apology he flees underground and becomes active in the resistance movement. He summons Tilo to join him and later Musa flees just before a police raid on his houseboat – Tilo is arrested and due to be tortured but scares Amrik but asking for a note to be passed to Biplap (now high up in intelligence) quoting her childhood nickname for him. Biplap arranges for Naga to pick Musa up and the two become married – later the two split up and Biplap becomes Tilo’s landlord. Tilo picks up the baby and decides to name her after Musa’s dead child – but scared the police will arrest her in their search for the baby (and that as a result they will find some papers of Musa) goes to live with Anjum.

Amrik we find flees to the US claiming asylum and using his torture knowledge to pose as a victim claims asylum – but is found by Kashmiris including Musa and ends up killng himself and his family due to his guilt when confronted by them. The baby’s mother we find out is a member of a tribal group who after arrest and gang rape by the police (which is when she became pregnant) becomes a Naxalite.

The novel ranges across many aspects of Kashmiri separatism: army atrocities and tortures, the disappearance of young men to provide bodies to justify army actions, the rivalries and fighting amongst the different resistance organisations, the punishments of informants.

Roy also brings in many other areas about which she has been politically active as well as various historical incidents; neo-liberalism, the Bhopal disaster, Hirja rights, the Naxalite movement, tribal land enclosures, Gujarat riots, Narenda Modi’s prime ministership and the “Saffron Parakeets” of Hindu activism associated with him, the mothers of the Disappeared, the Second Freedom Struggle and various anti-corruption activists, Caste conflict and Dalit rights, Indira Ghandi’s assassination, 9-11.

Various other recurring ideas include conceptual art, junk texts, Indian bureaucracy, world events and particularly global terrorism.

As well as conventional narrative which varies across tense and person, the story is also told by way of letters, diary musings, news clippings, an A-Z ‘Kashmiri-English Alphabet’.

As all of the above should imply this can only be described as a sprawling book – Roy seems to want to cram in every aspect of Indian history since her only other novel 20 years previously, all of her political stances and campaigns in that period and every literary style and character she has conceived over that period. The book is in the classic Indian literary style, part Magic realism, part Dickensian (both in the number of characters and in the social activism underlying the characters and plot) and part character-trait-as-national allegory (one of the Hirja’s remarks of their transgender nature “The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”) which Roy herself helped popularise with her Booker winning novel.

It’s clear though that firstly Roy is returning to the novel form (and co-opting magic realism) to find a different way to bring her campaigning to a wider audience and in a different format.

"From what little he knew, Naga sensed there was a substantial piece of the puzzle that had gone missing in the newspaper stories – a sort of epic Macondo madness, the stuff of literature not madness."

And also that the detail heavy, and violent aspects of the plot (almost every character seems to have had an acquaintance or relative victim of some form of violence) are deliberate

"I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens, there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature."