The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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.