The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
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4,3 • 6 notes
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE 2018
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE and THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'At magic hour; when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke...'
So begins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy's incredible follow-up to The God of Small Things. We meet Anjum, who used to be Aftab, who runs a guest-house in an Old Delhi graveyard and gathers around her the lost, the broken and the cast out. We meet Tilo, an architect, who although she is loved by three men, lives in a 'country of her own skin' . When Tilo claims an abandoned baby as her own, her destiny and that of Anjum become entangled as a tale that sweeps across the years and a teeming continent takes flight...
'A sprawling kaleidoscopic fable' Guardian, Books of the Year
'Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first' Financial Times
'A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Appearing two decades after 1997's celebrated The God of Small Things, Roy's ambitious, original, and haunting second novel fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of front-page headlines. Anjum, one of its two protagonists, is born intersex and raised as a male. Embracing her identity as a woman, she moves from her childhood home in Delhi to the nearby House of Dreams, where hijra like herself live together, and then to a cemetery when that home too fails her. The dwelling she cobbles together on her family's graves becomes a paradoxically life-affirming enclave for the wounded, outcast, and odd. The other protagonist, the woman who calls herself S. Tilottama, fascinates three very different men but loves only one, the elusive Kashmiri activist Musa Yeswi. When an abandoned infant girl appears mysteriously amid urban litter and both Anjum and Tilo have reasons to try to claim her, all their lives converge. Shifting fluidly between moods and time frames, Roy juxtaposes first-person and omniscient narration with "found" documents to weave her characters' stories with India's social and political tensions, particularly the violent retaliations to Kashmir's long fight for self-rule. Sweeping, intricate, and sometimes densely topical, the novel can be a challenging read. Yet its complexity feels essential to Roy's vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world. 150,000-copy announced first printing.
