St Aldate's
Oxford OX1 1RA
UK
Blackwell’s Bookshop is delighted to announce that on Wednesday 6th June at 7pm at The Oxford Town Hall, Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy will be joining us for a very special event. In celebration of the paperback release, Arundhati Roy will be in conversation with Faisal Devji talking about her bestselling novel ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years-the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.
Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love-and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.
Described by The New York Times Book Review as ‘Gorgeous, supple, playful… Roy writes with astonishing vividness… Again and again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world’, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ is Arundhati’s extraordinary first novel in 20 years since ‘The God of Small Things’, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Since its release in 2017 it has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Man Booker Prize 2017, the National Book Critics Circle and The Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Arundhati Roy is the author of ‘The God of Small Things’, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages, and ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.
Arundhati Roy has also published several works of non-fiction, including ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ and ‘Broken Republic’.
Dr Faisal Devji is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Currently in Oxford, he is University Reader in Modern South Asian History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Faisal Devji is the author of a range of titles including ‘Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea’.
Tickets cost £8. For all enquiries please email [email protected] or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623. The doors for this event will open at 6:15pm and seats will be allocated on a first come first seated basis.