The Shape of the Beast is our world laid bare by a mind that has consistently and unhesitatingly engaged with its changing realities and often anticipated the way things have moved in the last decade.In the fourteen interviews collected here, conducted between January 2001 and March 2008, Arundhati Roy examines the nature of state and corporate power as it has emerged during this period, and the shape that resistance movements are taking. As she speaks about people displaced by dams and industry, the genocide in Gujurat, Maoist rebels, the war in Kashmir and the global War on Terror, she raises fundamental questions about democracy, justice and non-violent protest.Unabashedly political, this is also a deeply personal collection that talks about the necessity of taking a stand and about the dilemma of guarding the private space necessary for writing in a world that demands urgent, unequivocal intervention.
War has spread from the borders of India to the forests in the very heart of the country. Combining brilliant analysis and reportage by one of India's iconic writers, Broken Republic examines the nature of progress and development in the emerging global superpower, and asks fundamental questions about modern civilization itself - in three incisive essays:
Mr Chidambaram's War'The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa . . . 'Walking with the Comrades'The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with "India's single biggest internal security challenge". I'd been waiting for months to hear from them . . . 'Trickledown Revolution'In the early morning hours of 2 July 2010, in the remote forests of Adilabad, the Andhra Pradesh State Police fired a bullet into the chest of a man called Cherukuri Rajkumar, known to his comrades as Azad . . .'
This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy.Beginning with the state-backed pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu Nationalism and India's Neo-liberal economic reforms which began their journey together in the early 1990s are now turning India into a police state. She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities - Muslim, Christian, Adivasi and Dalit, the rise of terrorism and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. The collection ends with an account of the of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.The Dark Side of Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.
On 13 December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by a few heavily armed men. Eleven years later, we still do not know who was behind the attack, nor the identity of the attackers. Both the Delhi high court and the Supreme Court of India have noted that the police violated legal safeguards, fabricated evidence and extracted false confessions. Yet, on 9 February 2013, one man, Mohammad Afzal Guru, was hanged to 'satisfy' the 'collective conscience' of society.
This updated reader brings together essays by lawyers, academics, journalists and writers who have looked closely at the available facts and who have raised serious questions about the investigations and the trial. This new version examines the implications of Mohammad Afzal Guru's hanging and what it says about the Indian government's relationship with Kashmir.
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 and THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A sprawling kaleidoscopic fable' Guardian, Books of the Year
'Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first' Financial Times'A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' Washington PostThe first novel in 20 years from the Booker-prize winning author of The God of Small ThingsThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years-the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, 'normalcy' is declared.Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her.The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love-and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts.'A novel that demands and rewards the reader's concentration, this is a dazzling return to form' Independent'This novel is a freedom song. Every page has the stamp of Roy's originality. Such brutality, such beauty' Amitva Kumar, the author of Immigrant, Montana 'Intricately layered and passionate, studded with jokes and with horrors... This is a work of extraordinary intricacy and grace' Prospect Magazine'Gorgeous, supple, playful... Roy writes with astonishing vividness... Again and again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world' The New York Times Book Review'A masterpiece. Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, García Màrquez, and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit. An entrancing, imaginative, and wrenching epic' Booklist starred review
An account of the extraordinary meeting between four brilliant political activists: Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Pentagon Papers insider Daniel Ellsberg and acclaimed actor John Cusack'What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our dreams? What sort of dreams were these that have been broken?'
In 2014, four people met in secret in a hotel room in Moscow. Each was a leading global advocate for government transparency and accountability: they had come together to talk. Over the course of two days, Arundhati Roy, Edward Snowden, John Cusack and Daniel Ellsburg shared ideas and beliefs - about the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, the NSA and the ongoing crises in the Middle East, the American government and the nature of activism.Co-authored by Roy and Cusack, and interleaving verbatim conversations with narrated recollections, this Penguin Special captures an historic moment. Interrogating the geopolitical forces that shape our world, it is both political and personal, activist and humanist - irreverent, funny and absolutely urgent. In Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, Arundhati Roy and John Cusack issue a powerful rallying cry, a call to resistance against America's ongoing, malign hegemony.
