The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)
Twenty years ago Arundhati Roy produced a first novel, The God of Small Things, in which caste and place controlled a tightlywoven and tragic love story whose cadences drew on south Indian speech. That won the Booker Prize and became a great bestseller, selling six million copies worldwide. Since then Roy has been engaged in political activism in her native country, always a thorn in the side of the Indian establishment that once fêted her. She has watched her country’s turn to Hindu nationalism with horror, and it seemed as though the injustices she exposed in her non-fiction might permanently divert her from novels. But it has turned out not to be so. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is larger, more complicated, more multilingual, more challenging as a reading experience than The God of Small Things, and no less immersing.