The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Starred review from April 3, 2017
Appearing two decades after 1997's celebrated The God of Small Things, Roy's ambitious, original, and haunting second novel fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of front-page headlines. Anjum, one of its two protagonists, is born intersex and raised as a male. Embracing her identity as a woman, she moves from her childhood home in Delhi to the nearby House of Dreams, where hijra like herself live together, and then to a cemetery when that home too fails her. The dwelling she cobbles together on her family's graves becomes a paradoxically life-affirming enclave for the wounded, outcast, and odd. The other protagonist, the woman who calls herself S. Tilottama, fascinates three very different men but loves only one, the elusive Kashmiri activist Musa Yeswi. When an abandoned infant girl appears mysteriously amid urban litter and both Anjum and Tilo have reasons to try to claim her, all their lives converge. Shifting fluidly between moods and time frames, Roy juxtaposes first-person and omniscient narration with "found" documents to weave her characters' stories with India's social and political tensions, particularly the violent retaliations to Kashmir's long fight for self-rule. Sweeping, intricate, and sometimes densely topical, the novel can be a challenging read. Yet its complexity feels essential to Roy's vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world. 150,000-copy announced first printing.

Starred review from April 15, 2017
The first novel in 20 years from Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997, etc.) and a book worth the wait: a humane, engaged tale of love, politics, and no small amount of suffering. Who is the fairest of them all, Anjum or Tilottama? Both are beautiful, each in her own way, but time has not been kind to either. Born with both male and female genitals and likened to the disappearing corpse-cleaning vultures of India, Anjum lives among ghosts, while Tilo has been caught up in an independence movement and risks execution at the hands of a coldly technocratic army officer. Roy's latest begins as a near fairy tale that soon turns dark, full of characters and their meetings, accidental and orchestrated alike, in the streets, rooming houses, and business offices of Delhi: school friends become partners in political crime, lovers become strangers to one another. Of one such pair, Roy writes, "He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant's mind. She, a woman trapped in a man's body." But, Roy tells us, identities are what we make of them; in an early scene, the mother of a child the other children taunt as "She-He, He-She Hee!" seeks guidance in a temple consecrated to a Jewish merchant who moved from Armenia to Delhi, converted to Islam, and ended life dangerously committing blasphemy by virtue of his uncertainty about the nature of God. So it is with all the people of Roy's book, each trying to live right in this world of "fucked-up unexpectedness." Roy's novel shows clear kinship with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude, a story that, like hers, begins and ends with death; the first and last place we see here is a cemetery. But there are other echoes, including a nicely subtle nod to Salman Rushdie, as Roy constructs a busy world in which characters cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and gender to find, yes, that utmost happiness of which the title speaks. An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor. Let's hope we won't have to wait two decades for its successor.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 15, 2017

Roy's first novel since her 1997 Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, is well worth the wait. It begins with the story of Anjum, a hijra (transgender or gender-nonconforming individual) growing up in a traditional Muslim family in Delhi. Anjum moves into a house with other hijra, then, after surviving a massacre while on a religious pilgrimage, moves to a graveyard where she creates an unlikely home for misfits. Tilo, another major character, is the defiant wife of a journalist living in a wealthy diplomatic enclave of Delhi. She is described first through the eyes of her college friend Biplab, a government employee, who sees her as misled by Kashmiri rebel propaganda. Through the eyes of a mob in Jantar Mantar, she is the "kidnapper" of an abandoned baby. To an academic who has been fasting for 11 years, she is a publisher. The uncanny intersecting of these and many other characters' lives, along with fables, songs, and literary quotes, create a brilliant bricolage. Roy looks unflinchingly at brutal poverty, human cruelty, and the absurdities of modern war; somehow, she turns it into poetry. VERDICT Highly recommended for all readers of literary fiction. Fans of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, or Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire will especially enjoy.--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2017
Roy lit up the literary cosmos with her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), a Man Booker Prize winner that continues to be avidly read and cherished the world over. In the intervening 20 years, the exceptionally talented, caring, and intrepid Roy devoted herself to social activism while writing numerous articles and five books of inquisitive, finely crafted nonfiction. She also worked on her second novel, which is her second masterpiece. As the ironic title suggests, this is a saga of eviscerating social critique and caustic humor, but it is also a deeply tragic and profoundly beautiful book in its linguistic chiaroscuro. As her intriguingly complex characters endure terror and absurdity, treachery and wonder, tyranny and passion, Roy explicates the horrific conflicts roiling twenty-first-century India and brutally occupied Kashmir. But as specific as her unnerving dramatization is of the dire clashes between Hindus and Muslims over faith, territory, and justice, her depiction of the consequences of extreme ideologies, systemic corruption, and rampant violence is of universal resonance. The unifying force in this tale of suffering, sacrifice, and transcendence is Anjum, a hermaphrodite who lives as a woman in New Delhi, initially as a glamorous standout among the transgender Hijra, a group with a long, fascinating history in South Asia. After barely surviving anti-Muslim atrocities fueled by 9/11, Anjum retreats to a graveyard, where she cobbles together a sanctuary she calls the Jannat (which translates as paradise ) Guest Home and Funeral Services. There a foundling brings together Anjum and her enclave and a quartet of friends and lovers who met in college. Artist Tilottama, like Roy, is the daughter of a divorced Syrian Christian mother. Biplab became a high-ranking Indian intelligence officer; Musa, a daring Kashmiri freedom fighter and master of disguises; and Naga, a famous journalist. Each of three men loves Tilottama, and all four are under threat from Amrik Singh, a cold-blooded Indian army officer tagged as the Butcher of Kashmir. From Anjum's cemetery refuge to a small Delhi apartment, a movie theater turned into a torture facility, a Kashmiri houseboat, and the jungle hideouts of Maoist rebels, Roy's entrancing, imaginative, and wrenching epic exposes relentless strategies of oppression, including the abuse and murder of innocents, the cynical lies of counterinsurgency efforts, the infrastructure of impunity, and the commodification of trauma in the supermarket of grief. Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, Garcia Marquez, and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit as she questions our perceptions of gender, family, home, country, war, freedom, love, and death in this righteous and tender illumination of humankind's paradoxical capacities for cruelty and kindness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)