After a gap of twenty years since winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997, Arundhati Roy’s second novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, is set to be published in 2017
Over the last twenty years after winning the Man Booker Prize for her debut novel ‘The God of Small Things’, Roy has published a wide range of nonfiction, covering varied topics from the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to a condemnation of India’s nuclear tests. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which the publisher Hamish Hamilton announced on Monday, will only be her second novel.
Roy’s publishers called her new novel “one of the finest in we have read in recent times”, and an “incredible book on multiple levels”
“The writing is extraordinary, and so too are the characters – brought to life with such generosity and empathy, in language of the utmost freshness, joyfully reminding us that words are alive too, that they can wake us up and lend us new ways of seeing, feeling, hearing, engaging. It makes the novel new – in the original meaning of novel,” said Simon Prosser, of Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton in the UK, and Meru Gokhale, of Penguin Random House India, in a joint statement.
Arundhati Roy in a statement added “I am glad to report that the mad souls (even the wicked ones) in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have found a way into the world, and that I have found my publishers”.
As the world awaits the much awaited second novel from Arundhati Roy, she has been invited to the second edition of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) to be held between 2nd and 5th February,2017 at the beach in Kozhikode.