When an acclaimed novelist publishes their first new work in 20 years, people take notice.
When the first book was Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things,” the interest is especially intense. She was awarded the esteemed Booker Prize for the best novel in the English language in 1997.
Roy’s new work is “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.” The novel concerns, as she suggests in the text itself, “the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.”
That nation is India. Its divisions and tumults are central, but the themes are global, timely and even otherworldly. The work has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
At this event, Roy read from her much anticipated second novel and spoke with The Elliott Bay Book Company’s Rick Simonson about her writing process, political and social activism, non-fiction work and the complexities of life in India.
Sonya Harris recorded this Town Hall Seattle event on June 27.
Please note: This recording contains unedited language of an adult nature.
Listen to the full version below:
