Fiction

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Item: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Author: Kerryn Goldsworthy

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

June-July 2017, no. 392

Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 443 pp, 9780241303986

Fiction

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

by Kerryn Goldsworthy •

June-July 2017, no. 392

Arundhati Roy’s first and only other novel was The God of Small Things (1997). It attracted an advance of half a million pounds; publishing rights were sold in twenty-one countries; and it won the 1997 Booker Prize, as it was then called. Since then it has sold six million copies and has been translated into forty languages. In the interval, Roy has been prolific in her non-fiction and fearless in her political activism.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

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Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’. A former Editor of ABR (1986–87), she is one of Australia’s most prolific and respected literary critics. Her publications include several anthologies, a critical study of Helen Garner, and her book Adelaide, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. In November 2012 she was named as the inaugural ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow. Her Fellowship article on reviewing, ‘Everyone’s a Critic’, appeared in the May 2013 issue of ABR.