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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Arundhati Roy
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
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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
Publisher's summary
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.
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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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
- Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- By: Katherine Boo
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.
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An Antidote for Shantaram
- By Dr. on 06-14-12
By: Katherine Boo
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Midnight's Children
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Lyndam Gregory
- Length: 24 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
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Outstanding book, superb narration
- By MarcS on 06-09-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
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A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
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When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
- A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace
- By: Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts
- Narrated by: Nancy Kwan
- Length: 3 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This haunting memoir tells the brutal story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of an innocent victim whose childhood was dominated by violence, devastation, and conflicts between the teachings of her culture and the realities of war. The youngest in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was 12 years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her village. She was raped and "ruined" for marriage by Viet Cong soldiers, imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese, and sentenced to death by the Viet Cong. Ultimately fleeing to the U.S. with her children, she finally found peace, and in 1986, she was reunited with her family in Vietnam. The story of her homecoming, interwoven with her memories of the war years, paints a vivid picture of a noble, optimistic woman and her native country.
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Difficult to listen to
- By heatherhg on 07-01-07
By: Le Ly Hayslip, and others
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Shalimar the Clown
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception.
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Incredible
- By Barry on 12-07-05
By: Salman Rushdie
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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Something Fierce
- Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
- By: Carmen Aguirre
- Narrated by: Carmen Aguirre
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Carmen Aguirre was six-year-old when she and her family fled to Canada following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent 1973 coup in Chile. She was only eleven-years-old when her mother and stepfather joined the resistance movement and returned to South America, taking Carmen and her sister went with them. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz, Bolivia, the girls' own double lives began. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.
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revolutionary read
- By David Brown on 04-05-18
By: Carmen Aguirre
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The Corpse Washer
- By: Sinan Antoon
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise.
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Gorgeous story with talented narration
- By N. Barnes on 03-11-18
By: Sinan Antoon
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Mosaic
- A Chronicle of Five Generations
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
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Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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Green City in the Sun
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Edie Tusor
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1917 Dr. Grace Treverton arrives in Kenya determined to bring modern medicine to the African natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. Grace soon finds a deadly rival in Mama Wachera, an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions against the encroaching whites.
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Beautifully written
- By nancy wanty on 12-18-23
By: Barbara Wood
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The Fear
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”
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Read at your own Risk!
- By Jim on 05-05-15
By: Peter Godwin
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Rare 5-Star Across the Board!
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What listeners say about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mercy Wambui
- 08-11-18
A story as complex and as diverse as India
Arundhati Roy’s masterpiece is a fantastic lyrical treat of stories within stories. The wide range of characters remain with you as they experience humanity in both horrific and glorious ways. The complexity of Kashmir is always present. So are other questions - cast, LGBT, poverty, power, ideology. Roy invites you to live life on the edges and on the margins of a changing India.
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- Sarah Zaaimi
- 04-19-21
Simply stunning!
An intricate yet tender insight into India’s Kashmir conflict that breaks up in a web of sub-stories illustrating the country’s ill-management of cast, religion, and gender minorities. Beautiful and rich story with the right doses of drama, history, and romance. Highly recommend it!
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- Julie
- 07-10-17
it's power to open hearts to let in her world.
it is poetry in the form of a novel. compassion in the form of words.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-18-17
Author narration does not work for me
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.
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37 people found this helpful
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- Angel
- 06-14-17
Master story teller
It was nice she made it an audiobook, that she read it. It had many complex ideas about her homeland. It was very human and heartbreaking.
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.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Gaurav
- 07-05-17
Beautiful story delivered with panache
Myriad contemporary issues.
A mirror for those who may care to see it.
Another masterpiece.
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3 people found this helpful
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- VB
- 01-02-18
Arundhati Roy, ever the prophet
I'm so glad the author read this book herself. Timely, enlightening, unsettling, hopeful. And beautiful
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- LRH
- 11-24-17
Narration not great for non-Indian listeners!
I love Arundhati Roy's writing, but this novel is very complex with many characters and for a western ear, it is really hard to hear the difference in characters. This book does need a native Indian narrator, but perhaps someone whose skill is in narration and could do a clearer job with defining the characters. I made it through half the book, but found I was dreading trying to listen to the other half. I think, like some others, I will get the kindle version and finish it that way.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Avery Janeczek
- 11-14-17
Stunning, important!
An incredible, gorgeous, skillfully crafted, highly informed, artful modern work that celebrates those who are underrepresented and often considered disposable by the machinations of capitalism and empire. Highly recommended! Intense, and dynamic not a lightweight escape. Especially riveting for anyone with a connection to India, Yoga, etc. and especially important in this dangerously anti-Muslim global atmosphere we are in. It was amazing to hear it read by Arundhati, a beautiful way to experience the book.
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- kristina
- 08-24-18
a master storyteller
evocative, powerful, brave and fierce. Roy is a truth teller and has the courage that many lack, especially world leaders.
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