Arundhati Roy Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Arundhati Roy is an Indian author of nonfiction who was born November 24, 1961. Her full name is Suzanna Arundhati Roy and she is best known for the novel she wrote published in 1997 titled The God of Small Things. This book won her the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1997 and became the biggest selling book by an Indian author who was not an expatriate. It was an international number one best seller and did very well in many different countries.

Arundhati is known for being not only an author but a political activist that stands up for human rights, environmental causes, and the underprivileged and threatened in her homeland. She is known for standing up for her principles and has even been to court and prison for a night because of it.

She was born in Shilong in Meghalaya, India. Her parents were Mary Roy, who was a Malayali Syrian Christian women’s rights activist who hailed from Kerala. Rajib Roy was her father, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager that was originally from Calcutta.

Arundhati’s parents divorced when she was just two years old and she went to live with her mother and her brother in Kerala. The family also lived with Roy’s mother’s mother, her grandmother, in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. They moved to Kerala once more when Arundhati was five and her mother began a school. She went to school at Corpus Christi in Kottayam and then the Lawrence School in Lovedale and Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu.

Roy went and studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, meeting her eventual boyfriend Gerard da Cunha, an architect. They lived together in two cities before splitting up. She returned to Delhi and gained a position working with the National Institute of Urban Affairs. She met an independent filmmaker in 1984 who offered her a role in his movie Massey Sahib. Pradib Krishen and Arundhati Roy collaborated on a t.v. series that focused on the independence movement of India and also two movies together, including Electric Moon and Annie.

Roy decided to leave the film world and work different jobs to entertain herself, running aerobics classes at one point. However, the couple eventually broke up. Roy continued to write and became financially secure thanks to how well The God of Small Things did. An international bestseller has set her up to write far more novels as she went along, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War is Peace, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and more.

She is related to media personality Prannoy Roy and currently lives in Delhi.

The God of Small Things was an international hit, and if you read it, you can see why. This literary phenomenon features heavily the area of Kerala in southern India. This novel has the main characters of the twins Esthappen and Rahel. These two twins live in a country that is going through a lot of political turbulence. Throughout the novel, Roy manages to bring an area of India to life with details, color, and magical realism.

This novel has the twins crafting a childhood for themselves really out of nothing. They play among the heaps of peppercorns and the vats of banana jam resting in their grandmother’s factory and play together all of the time. Their family is varied and interesting. There is the twins, their pretty but lonely mother, their interesting Uncle Chacko who is a pickle baron, and their enemy Baby Kochamma, a former nun and a current grand aunt.

When their Uncle Chacko’s ex-wife brings her daughter to visit for Christmas, the twins find out that much can change in a day, drastically and even for the worse.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel published in 2017 and written by Roy. This book is set across the subcontinent of India, a familiar setting place for Roy. The cramped and tight neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the new city roads blend into the Kashmir mountains and valleys and more. It’s all captured in this fanciful and rich book from Roy that focuses on the area where war is known as peace and peace is known as war.

This is an exciting story that involves a love story with tons of characters that will come to life off the page. The heroes of this story are the people who have been absolutely broken by the world they inhabit but then put together and rescued by acts of love and hope. This story is told in a whisper and a shout with tears and laughter, Roy creating a realistic setting and including people in the book that aren’t real but seem to be, brought together by optimism and what they can do for each other to make this life better for the rest.

The main character of this fascinating book is called Anjum, but her name used to be Aftab. She is unrolling a Persian carpet that is seeing right through to the threads in the graveyard of the city she calls home. We come across the unforgettable Tilo and her eccentricities and learn of all the men who loved her. This includes her current and ex-sweetheart Musa. Their fates are together and they are always together in some way even if they are apart.

So Tilo and Anjum and Musa all have their stories intertwined. We also meet the landlord of Tilo, who happens to be a former suitor of hers. Now he is an intelligence officer that is posted to Kabul. We also meet the Miss Jebeens one and two. The first in a child that was buried in the graveyard, the second was abandoned on a sidewalk in New Delhi.

There are so many characters in this book that are interesting and this bright new novel is a breath of fresh air when it comes to the fiction scene. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel that draws you in and interests you right from the start so that you read from start to finish. Check it out for yourself and see the lush people and places that Roy has once again created and pulled out of her hat and marvel at the wondrous and important people that live in her world.