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“A fiercely unforgettable novel…a love story with characters so heartbreaking and compelling they sear themselves into the reader’s brain.” ?Patty Rhule, USA TODAY

"Moving. . . powerful. . .The kind of book that makes you feel like you've lived several times over. [It] contains so much of everything: anguish and joy and love and war and death and life, so much of being human. Ministry rip[s] open the world to show us everything that is dazzlingly beautiful and brutally ugly about it...Roy centers the vulnerable and the unseen, making clear that love is the only way for individuals to really meet across the borders of skin or country. Everything is alive in Ministry, from emotions to people to the country itself. It is this aliveness of every human as well as every animal and thing that makes this novel so remarkable. Ministry is the ultimate love letter to the richness and complexity of India?and the world?in all its hurly-burly, glorious, and threatened heterogeneity. Roy is a treasure of India and of the world.” ?Anita Felicelli, LA Review of Books

"A deeply rewarding work… Roy writes with unabashed beauty...Images in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness wedge themselves in the mind like memories of lived experience.” ?Laura Miller, Slate

“Stirring. . . humane and impassioned . . . beautiful and rich. The novel has the feel of a yarn…Roy’s observations unspool as vivid and gimlet, whether she is describing personal catastrophe or national disasters…Brilliant writing?an ambitious story with a profound moral integrity and a deep emotional impact. ”?Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune

A dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent-from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war.
It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love-and by hope.

The tale begins with Anjum-who used to be Aftab-unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her-including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover; their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be. We meet Tilo’s landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi.

As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.