
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Arundhati Roy
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By:
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Arundhati Roy
About this listen
A richly moving new novel - the first since the author's Booker Prize-winning, internationally celebrated debut, The God of Small Things, went on to become a beloved best seller and an enduring classic.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety - in search of meaning and of love.
In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met.
A braided narrative of astonishing force and originality, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once a love story and a provocation - a novel as inventive as it is emotionally engaging. It is told with a whisper, in a shout, through joyous tears, and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Its heroes, both present and departed, have been broken by the world we live in - and then mended by love. For this reason they will never surrender.
How to tell a shattered story?
By slowly becoming everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
Humane and sensuous, beautifully told, this extraordinary novel demonstrates the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts.
©2017 Arundhati Roy (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Editors Select, June 2017
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness begins in the "Jannat Guest House", a graveyard where living people have taken up residence. (If there’s a better metaphor for autobiographical fiction, I’d like to hear it.) In a cruel society-outside-of-society, some dignity still abides for the broken-down denizens: untouchables, addicts, abandoned children, and our transgender protagonist, Anjum: "she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain." The author’s narration enlivens each character’s point of view and makes this episodic and sprawling story seem like a deliberately choreographed ballet. Every character appears on their own terms, and the author’s measured, attentive performance conveys the cruelty and wit and unexpected sweetness of their experience - Arundhati Roy’s voice is not just lyrical, it’s essential. —Christina, Audible Editor
Critic reviews
Featured Article: The Best Indian Authors to Listen to Right Now
"India," to quote actress and human rights activist Shabana Azmi, "is a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously." Just as those different time periods seem to coexist in one place, so do the voices of brilliant literary talents. Each of these writers and their works have contributed to help the world better understand this expansive country and its beautiful, multifaceted culture, whether it be from within India’s own borders or through the memory of its customs and traditions from distant continents.
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Story
With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement - certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession, Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg.
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The narration - why?????
- By agarista on 07-20-21
By: Yaniv Iczkovits
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All over Creation
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Ozeki
- Narrated by: Ruth Ozeki
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Yumi Fuller hasn’t set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho—heart of the potato-farming industry—since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil.
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ozeki !!!
- By Leah on 01-03-25
By: Ruth Ozeki
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Everything Here Is Beautiful
- By: Mira T. Lee
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Emily Woo Zeller, Ozzie Rodriguez, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Two sisters - Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister's protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts hearing voices, it is Miranda who must find a way to reach her sister. But Lucia impetuously plows ahead, marrying a bighearted, older man only to leave him, suddenly, to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant.
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Review
- By Sherri H Skalski on 01-30-18
By: Mira T. Lee
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Daughters of the Dust
- A Gullah-Geechee Novel
- By: Julie Dash
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing from the magical world of her iconic Sundance award-winning film, Julie Dash’s stand-alone novel tells another rich, historical tale of the Gullah-Geechee people: a multigenerational story about a Brooklyn College anthropology student who finds an unexpected homecoming when she heads to the South Carolina Sea Islands to study her ancestors.
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My BFF Bahni...
- By Lillian Collins on 12-31-22
By: Julie Dash
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The Birdcage
- By: Eve Chase
- Narrated by: Taj Atwall, Aurora Dawson-Hunte
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When half-sisters Kat, Flora, and Lauren are unexpectedly summoned to Rock Point, their wild and remote Cornish summer home, it's not a welcome invitation. They haven't been back since that fateful summer twenty years ago—a summer they're desperate to forget. But when they arrive, it's clear they're not alone. Someone is lurking in the shadows, watching their every move. Someone who remembers exactly what they did.
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STUNNING
- By mymimisthebest on 07-24-22
By: Eve Chase
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The High Mountains of Portugal
- A Novel
- By: Yann Martel
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that - if he can find it - would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe's earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure. Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás' quest.
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Not for me
- By J. Blanchard on 02-26-16
By: Yann Martel
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Things We Lost to the Water
- A Novel
- By: Eric Nguyen
- Narrated by: Quyen Ngo
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations.
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Vietnamese immigrant experience
- By Susan on 08-30-21
By: Eric Nguyen
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The Skin and Its Girl
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Cypher
- Narrated by: Victoria Nassif, Haneen Arafat Murphy
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
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Engaging story, very well told
- By Moth77 on 05-10-25
By: Sarah Cypher
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The Vanished Birds
- A Novel
- By: Simon Jimenez
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A ship captain, unfettered from time. A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power. A millennia-old woman, haunted by lifetimes of mistakes. In this captivating debut of connection across space and time, these outsiders will find in each other the things they lack: a place of love and belonging. A safe haven. A new beginning. But the past hungers for them, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.
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Character driven, tech minimum space opera
- By David on 02-08-20
By: Simon Jimenez
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In the Beauty of the Lilies
- A Novel
- By: John Updike
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows listeners an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the moving picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.
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In the Beauty of the Lillies
- By linda on 08-15-20
By: John Updike
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Ninth City Burning
- By: J. Patrick Black
- Narrated by: Suzanne Elise Freeman, Lincoln Hoppe, Ryan Gesell, and others
- Length: 21 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it - until we discovered we could wield the power, too. Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines.
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Really Tuff Read/Listen
- By Art Simmons on 10-05-16
By: J. Patrick Black
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Unmarriageable
- A Novel
- By: Soniah Kamal
- Narrated by: Soniah Kamal
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In this one-of-a-kind retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern-day Pakistan, Alys Binat has sworn never to marry - until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider.
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Could be entertaining if not for unlikable heroine
- By Web_mistress on 02-06-19
By: Soniah Kamal
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Where the Light Falls
- A Novel of the French Revolution
- By: Allison Pataki, Owen Pataki
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Three years after the storming of the Bastille, the streets of Paris are roiling with the spirit of revolution. The citizens of France are enlivened by the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The monarchy of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette has been dismantled - with the help of the guillotine - and a new nation is rising in its place. Jean-Luc, an idealistic young lawyer, moves his wife, Marie, and their infant son from their comfortable life in Marseille to Paris in the hopes of joining the cause.
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An enjoyable listen
- By missgrundy on 01-19-18
By: Allison Pataki, and others
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The Devourers
- A Novel
- By: Indra Das
- Narrated by: Shishir Kurup, Meera Simhan
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man's unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger's behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.
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Myth brought to life of piss and carnage
- By Sarah on 09-19-16
By: Indra Das
A story as complex and as diverse as India
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Simply stunning!
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it's power to open hearts to let in her world.
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Narration not great for non-Indian listeners!
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Stunning, important!
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a master storyteller
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fantastic novel
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Deep
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What did you like best about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness? What did you like least?
The cadence of the writing.How could the performance have been better?
Arundhati Roy is a great writer, and I loved The God of Small Things, but I am going to switch to my Kindle to read this book. Her voice is soothing and it is great to hear a book by its creator, but her voice never changes tone and it is monotonous to listen to for long periods (and this is a long book!). I find myself drifting and missing key points of the story. Plus, it is difficult to keep the long Indian names straight in my head when they are spoken vs. written. I feel that a professional narrator might have helped with this issue.Author narration does not work for me
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Otherwise it didn't move me much. She's a revolutionary at heart and this came from the heart, but unless you are from India it might be hard to get too involved in the plot.
Also it's nice to see she finally let her other famous novel become an audiobook, but too bad she didn't narrate that one, because who knows better then the author the real feelings of each line?
I like her nonfiction work better at this point and look forward to more of it. She is one of the greatest writers and activist of our times.
Master story teller
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