Best Indian Literature

Tracy Crosswhite has spent twenty years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah’s disappearance and the murder trial that followed. “Dugoni does a superior job of positioning [the plot elements] for maximum impact, especially in a climactic scene set in an abandoned mine during a blizzard—which is melodramatic but nevertheless effective.” — Publishers Weekly. “ My Sister’s Grave is a chilling portrait shaded in neo-noir, as if someone had taken a knife to a Norman Rockwell painting by casting small town America as the place where bad guys blend into the landscape, establishing Dugoni as a force to be reckoned with outside the courtroom as well as in.” — Providence Journal.

New York Times Best Seller. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday , and the Hudson Group A dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi. “A fiercely unforgettable novel…a love story with characters so heartbreaking and compelling they sear themselves into the reader’s brain.” –Patty Rhule, USA TODAY "Moving. Ministry rip[s] open the world to show us everything that is dazzlingly beautiful and brutally ugly about it...Roy centers the vulnerable and the unseen, making clear that love is the only way for individuals to really meet across the borders of skin or country. "A deeply rewarding work… Roy writes with unabashed beauty...Images in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness wedge themselves in the mind like memories of lived experience.” –Laura Miller, Slate “Stirring. The novel has the feel of a yarn…Roy’s observations unspool as vivid and gimlet, whether she is describing personal catastrophe or national disasters…Brilliant writing—an ambitious story with a profound moral integrity and a deep emotional impact. an engaged story, with many threads, that blends tragedy and political outrage with a humane and hopeful vision of the future… The Ministry of Utmost Happiness place[s] Roy at the forefront of Indian literature.” –Gregory McNamee, Kirkus Reviews. Roy shifts places, time periods, and viewpoints with the grace of a master choreographer… Ministry is a beautifully written, powerful story [that] spans a continent and several decades of war and peace and people who live in places and on the streets, as well as undercover and underground—a novel that’s worth the wait. With its insights into human nature, its memorable characters and its luscious prose, Ministry is well worth the wait.” –Sarah Begley, TIME “Propulsive, playful . Once a decade, if we are lucky, a novel emerges from the cinder pit of living that asks the urgent question of our global era. Roy’s second novel works its empathetic magic upon a breathtakingly broad slate—inviting us to stand with characters who refuse to be stigmatized or cast aside.” –Liesel Schillinger, O, The Oprah Magazine “A gem—a great tempest of a novel: a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international . You will [be] granted a powerful sense of the complexity, energy and diversity of contemporary India, in which darkness and exuberant vitality and inextricable intertwined.” —Claire Messud, The Financial Times “A lustrously braided and populated tale woven with ribbons of identity, love, mourning, and joy—and tied together with yellow mangoes, cigarettes, and damask roses.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair “Gorgeously wrought.” – Entertainment Weekly, “Summer’s 20 Must-Read Books”. If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics, Ministry encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, revolutionaries, and lovers…With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor, giddiness, and even transcendence.” —Daphne Beal, Vogue “Affecting . A rangy and roving novel of multiple voices; an intimate picture of a diverse cast of characters…We see in detail not only their everyday lives but also their beliefs, and the contexts that inform their actions…Tilo is the book’s beating heart, a beautiful and rebellious woman and a magical focal point toward which all desire in the novel flows. Roy’s instinct for satire is as sharp as ever, and her stories build to a broader portrait of India over the past few decades. And her unmistakable style and her way of seeing the world become something larger, too.” —Amitava Kumar, BookForum “Roy returns to fiction with tales that span from the mourned in a graveyard to the beating hearts of the people of Delhi, masterfully conveying the wide-ranging perseverance of the human soul.” —Steph Opitz, Marie Claire “It’s finally here! The novel’s greatest feat is showing the ways in which religious belief, gender identity, and even our safety in the world, are not fixed—they have as much fluidity as Roy’s astute plotting.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture Summer Books Preview. “The first novel in 20 years from Roy, and worth the wait: a humane, engaged near fairy tale that soon turns dark—full of characters and their meetings, accidental and orchestrated alike to find, yes, that utmost happiness of which the title speaks.” — Kirkus (starred review). .essential to Roy’s vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). “A masterpiece . Roy joins Dickens, Naipaul, García Márquez, and Rushdie in her abiding compassion, storytelling magic, and piquant wit…. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be a welcome gift for those who’ve missed Roy’s dazzling fiction.” —Eliza Thompson, Cosmopolitan, “11 Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down This Summer”. This intricately layered and passionate novel, studded with jokes and with horrors, has room for satire and romance, for rage and politics and for steely understatement. “As she did in “The God of Small Things,” Roy astutely unpacks the layers of politics and privilege inherent in caste, religion and gender identity. Her luminous passages span eras and regions of the Indian subcontinent and artfully weave the stories of several characters into a triumphant symphony, where strangers become friends, friends become family, and the disenfranchised find the strength to wrestle control of their own narratives.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune “This is the novel one hoped Arundhati Roy would write about India. To ask questions not of what we we’re seeing of late, but what we’ve been staring at the whole time… Love in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is harrowing, fragile and complicated and swears by sacrifice, but also – and Roy makes sure of this – love is unanticipated… The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an example of Roy’s commitment to those who feel the riot inside of them. Who refuse to be 'written out,' who understand that the tiniest breach in history, like 'a chuckle,' of all things 'could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.'". Questions of identity, gender, ethnicity, and religion make this a deep and richly satisfying read.” – The Christian Science Monitor. “ The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a dazzling work of imagination – a tumult of vibrant characters, stories and prose that engages deeply with recent Indian history and the struggles of India’s oppressed peoples. “Arundhati Roy is an exceptionally gifted writer, the kind who will send you into a panic about how capitalism is chewing up the environment one moment, then sweep you away from those earthly concerns with whimsical, musical prose the next.”– Chatelaine “This intimate epic about India over the past two decades is superb: political but never preachy; heartfelt yet ironic; precisely poetic.” – The Telegraph. “Fans of Arundhati Roy’s bestseller The God of Small Things will be delighted to find out that her new novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness occupies a similar place. This one is a sprawling story in the tradition of Charles Dickens about lovers and politics and religion and bad luck. “Roy merges her energies as a fiction writer and an activist, shaping a rich narrative that’s as complex and multivalent as modern India…. All of which doesn’t go even halfway to conveying the depth of observation, humour, Dickensian detail, accumulating tales of city life, both awful and extraordinary – the cows grazing on refuse, a man who lives in a tree—that Roy discharges by the first hundred pages.” –Charlotte Sinclair, Vogue.

Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the world he thought he knew, from the man he thought he was, until he must face a horrifying fact—he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. Blake Crouch on How the Television Series Twin Peaks Inspired Pines.

—President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin. Liu is a winner of the Hugo Award and a multiple winner of the Galaxy Award (the Chinese Hugo) and the Xing Yun Award (the Chinese Nebula).

On his way home, he commits a rash act, becomes a fugitive and brings life in his own village to a standstill--until he is captured by a weaponless Zen monk. Continually striving to perfect his technique, which leads him to a unique style of fighting with two swords simultaneously, he travels far and wide, challenging fighters of many disciplines, taking nature to be his ultimate and severest teacher and undergoing the rigorous training of those who follow the Way. Interweaving themes of unrequited love, misguided revenge, filial piety and absolute dedication to the Way of the Samurai, it depicts vividly a world Westerners know only vaguely. "... A stirring saga ... not only for readers interested in Japan but also for those who simply want a rousing read."