Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Compelling…musical and beautifully orchestrated. Roy’s depiction of furtive romance has a cinematic quality, as well as genuine poignancy and depth of emotion. Her gift is for the personal: for poetic description [and an] ability to map the complicated arithmetic of love and belonging.… Ministry manages to extract hope from tragedies witnessed.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Roy the artist [is] fully and brilliantly intact: prospering with stories and writing in gorgeous, supple prose…Again and again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world…Roy, in her nonfiction, has taken a sharp interest in Kashmir, and it is evident in this novel, which is blazing with details about the Indian government's occupation and the Kashmiri people's ensuing sorrow. She knows everything from the frighteningly euphemistic military terminology of the region…to the natural landscape.… She looks into homes, into bomb sites, into graveyards, into torture centers, into the "glassy, inscrutable" lakes. And she reveals for us the shattered psychology of Kashmiris who have been fighting the Indian Army and also occasionally collaborating with it. These sections of the book filled me with awe—not just as a reader, but as a novelist—for the sheer fidelity and beauty of detail.
Karah Mahajan - New York Times Book Review


A gem—a great tempest of a novel: a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international.… Here is writing that swirls so hypnotically it doesn’t feel like words on paper so much as ink on water. This vast novel will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Fearless…staggeringly beautiful—a fierce, fabulously disobedient novel …so fully realized it feels intimate, yet vibrates with the tragicomedy of myth.… Roy is writing at the height of her powers. Once a decade, if we are lucky, a novel emerges from the cinder pit of living that asks the urgent question of our global era. Roy’s novel is this decade’s ecstatic and necessary answer."
John Freeman - Boston Globe


Powerful and moving…reminds us what fiction can do. Roy’s exquisite prose is [a] rare instrument. She captures the horrors of headlines, and the quiet moments when lovers share poems and dreams. Ministry is infused with so much passion that it vibrates. It may leave you shaking, too.  Roy’s is a world in which love and hope sprout against all odds, like flowers pushing through cracked pavement.
Heller McAlpin - San Francisco Chronicle

 
Glorious…remarkable, colorful and compelling.… Roy has a passionate following, and her admirers will not be disappointed. This ambitious new novel, like its predecessor, addresses weighty themes in an intermittently playful narrative voice. You will [be] granted a powerful sense of the complexity, energy and diversity of contemporary India, in which darkness and exuberant vitality and inextricable intertwined.
Claire Messud - Financial Times (UK)


Magisterial, vibrant.…  Roy’s second novel works its empathetic magic upon a breathtakingly broad slate—inviting us to stand with characters who refuse to be stigmatized or cast aside.
Liesel Schillinger - Oprah Magazine
 

Ministry is the follow-up we’ve been longing for—a poetic, densely populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy. From its beginning, one is swept up in the story. If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics, Ministry encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, revolutionaries, and lovers.… With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor, giddiness, and even transcendence.
Daphne Beal -  Vogue


(Starred Review) [O]riginal, haunting…fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of front-page headlines.… [S]ometimes 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.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review) Roy's first novel since her 1997 Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, is well worth the wait.… The uncanny intersecting of these and many other characters' lives, along with fables, songs, and literary quotes, create a brilliant bricolage.  —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal


(Starred Review) Roy constructs a busy world in which characters cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and gender to find, yes, that utmost happiness…. An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor.
Kirkus Reviews