Hamish Hamilton UK and Penguin India are proud to announce that they will publish ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ by Arundhati Roy in June 2017.

“I am glad to report that the mad souls (even the wicked ones) in  ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ have found a way into the world, and that I have found my publishers,” says Arundhati Roy.

It is her first work of fiction since ‘The God of Small Things’, which won the Booker prize nineteen years ago in 1997.

Simon Prosser, Publishing Director of Hamish Hamilton & Penguin Books UK,  and Meru Gokhale, Editor-in-Chief, Literary Publishing, Penguin Random House India share, “To publish this book is both a pleasure and an honour.  What an incredible book it is—on multiple levels; one of the finest we have read in recent times. The writing is extraordinary, and so too are the characters – brought to life with such generosity and empathy, in language of the utmost freshness, joyfully reminding us that words are alive too, that they can wake us up and lend us new ways of seeing, feeling, hearing, engaging. It makes the novel new – in the original meaning of novel.”

According to Arundhati Roy’s literary agent David Godwin, the book has been in the making for 20 years and is worth the wait.