Humane and sensuous, beautifully told, The Ministry of Utmost Happinessdemonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts. How to tell a shattered story?By slowly becoming everybody.No.By slowly becoming everything. With stories told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent, as it braids together an aching love story and a decisive remonstration with characters who are as indelible as they are tenderly rendered. We meet Anjum, a hijra, as she unrolls her threadbare carpet on the floor of the cemetery in Old Delhi she calls home, while many miles away, we encounter the captivating Tilo, and the three men who in turn are captivated by her. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight, while in a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. Roy entwines these stories together to reveal people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love--and most especially, by hope. Beautiful in its telling, vivid in its detail, and breathtaking in its scope, with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy has reinvented what a novel can do and can be.
