‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.’
In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves.
On a concrete sidewalk, a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter.
In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people that attended her funeral.
And in the Jannat Guest House, two people who’ve known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around one another as though they have only just met.
Here is a cast of unforgettable characters caught up in the tide of history.
Told with a whisper, with a shout, with tears and with laughter, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a love story and a provocation.
Its heroes, present and departed, human and animal, have been broken by the world we live in and then mended by love — and for this reason, they will never surrender.
The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize for author Arundhati Roy in 1997. It was her debut novel and became not only a best seller but a true classic.
Now the 20-year wait for her second novel is over. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is available now from Dymocks. Click here to learn more.
With 65 stores in Australia and over 10 million books sold last year, Dymocks is the leading bookseller in Australia.