The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Anjum, born Aftab in a Muslim family in Old Delhi, leaves home as a young man to live in the Khwabgah, the House of Dreams, a ramshackle haveli of hijra women in the shadow of the Jama Masjid. After surviving a religious massacre in Gujarat, she moves into a graveyard and slowly builds the Jannat Guesthouse and Funeral Services around her. In a parallel arc set decades later, an architect named Tilo, three men who once loved her at college, and an abandoned baby left in the dust of a Delhi protest are drawn into the long Indian war over Kashmir. Arundhati Roy's second novel, published twenty years after The God of Small Things, threads these stories together into an elegy for a country torn by Hindutva, caste violence, and military occupation. It is at once a love story, a dirge, and a defiant celebration of the people the official Indian story tries to erase.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Arundhati Roy
All works by Arundhati Roy →
What you might want to know about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Anjum, a hijra woman raised as a boy in Old Delhi, leaves the household of fellow hijras and moves into a Muslim graveyard, where she builds a guesthouse called Jannat. Across the city, architect Tilo is loved by three men and pulled into the Kashmir insurgency. The two women's lives finally meet.
Yes. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) was Arundhati Roy's first novel after a 20-year break. Her debut, The God of Small Things (1997), won the Booker Prize. In between she focused on political nonfiction and activism.
Yes. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has multiple narrators and shifts across decades of Indian and Kashmiri political history. The prose is rich. Most readers find rewards in long-haul commitment.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was written by Arundhati Roy, published in 2017 by Penguin.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a standalone novel by Arundhati Roy, not part of a series.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.