Arundhati Roy Popular Books
Arundhati Roy Biography & Facts
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes. Early life Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to Mary Roy, a Malayali Jacobite Syrian Christian women's rights activist from Kerala and Rajib Roy, a Bengali Christian tea plantation manager from Kolkata. She has denied false rumors about her being a Brahmin by caste. When she was two, her parents divorced and she returned to Kerala with her mother and brother. For some time, the family lived with Roy's maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. When she was five, the family moved back to Kerala, where her mother started a school. Roy attended school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, where she met architect Gerard da Cunha. They married in 1978 and lived together in Delhi, and then Goa, before they separated and divorced in 1982. Personal life Roy returned to Delhi, where she obtained a position with the National Institute of Urban Affairs. In 1984, she met independent filmmaker Pradip Krishen, who offered her a role as a goatherd in his award-winning movie Massey Sahib. They later married the same year. They collaborated on a television series about India's independence movement and two films, Annie and Electric Moon. Disenchanted with the film world, Roy experimented with various fields, including running aerobics classes. Roy and Krishen currently live separately but are still married. She became financially secure with the success of her novel The God of Small Things, published in 1997. Roy is a cousin of prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, former head of the Indian television media group NDTV. She lives in Delhi. Career Early career: screenplays Early in her career, Roy worked in television and movies. She starred in Massey Sahib in 1985. She wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), a movie based on her experiences as a student of architecture, in which she also appeared as a performer, and Electric Moon (1992). Both were directed by her husband, Pradip Krishen, during their marriage. Roy won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1988 for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. She attracted attention in 1994 when she criticised Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen, which was based on the life of Phoolan Devi. In her film review titled "The Great Indian Rape Trick", she questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission", and charged Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning. The God of Small Things Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Aymanam. The publication of The God of Small Things catapulted Roy to international fame. It received the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction and was listed as one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year. It reached fourth position on The New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. From the beginning, the book was also a commercial success: Roy received half a million pounds as an advance. It was published in May, and the book had been sold in 18 countries by the end of June. The God of Small Things received stellar reviews in major American newspapers such as The New York Times (a "dazzling first novel," "extraordinary", "at once so morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple") and the Los Angeles Times ("a novel of poignancy and considerable sweep"), and in Canadian publications such as the Toronto Star ("a lush, magical novel"). It was one of the five best books of 1997 according to Time. Critical response in the United Kingdom was less positive, and the awarding of the Booker Prize caused controversy; Carmen Callil, a 1996 Booker Prize judge, called the novel "execrable", and a Guardian journalist called the contest "profoundly depressing". In India, the book was criticised especially for its unrestrained description of sexuality by E. K. Nayanar, then Chief Minister of Roy's home state Kerala, where she had to answer charges of obscenity. Later career Since the success of her novel, Roy has written a television serial, The Banyan Tree, and the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002). In early 2007, Roy said she was working on a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Roy contributed to We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, a book released in 2009 that explores the culture of peoples around the world, portraying their diversity and the threats to their existence. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organisation Survival International. Roy has written numerous essays on contemporary politics and culture. In 2014, they were collected by Penguin India in a five-volume set. In 2019, her nonfiction was collected in a single volume, My Seditious Heart, published by Haymarket Books. In October 2016, Penguin India and Hamish Hamilton UK announced that they would publish her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in June 2017. The novel was chosen for the Man Booker Prize 2017 Long List and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in January 2018. Roy received the lifetime achievement award at the 45th European Essay Prize for the French translation of her book Azadi. Advocacy Since publishing The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy has spent most of her time on political activism and nonfiction (such as collections of essays about social causes). She is a spokesperson of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and U.S. foreign policy. She opposes India's policies toward nuclear weapons as well as industrialization and economic growth (which she describes as "encrypted with genocidal potential" in Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy). She has also questioned the conduct of the Indian police and administration in the case of the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the Batla House encounter case, contending that the country has had a "shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake encounters". Support for Kashmiri separatism In an August 2008 interview with The Times of India, Roy expressed her support for the independence of Kashmir from India after the massive demonstrations in 2008 in favour of independence took place—some 500,000 people rallied in Srinagar in the Kashmir part of Jammu and Kashmir state of India for independence on 18 August 2008, following the Amarnath land transfer controversy. Accor.... Discover the Arundhati Roy popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Arundhati Roy books.
Best Seller Arundhati Roy Books of 2024
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The Bhagavad Gita
Juan MascaroThe Bhagavad Gita is an intensely spiritual work that forms the cornerstone of the Hindu faith, and is also one of the masterpieces of Sanskrit poetry. It describes how, at the beg...
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The Archer
Shruti Swamy“Set in 1970s Bombay, the novel explores art, ambition, gender roles and class with the same shimmering prose of Swamy’s first book, the story collection A House Is a Body.”San Fra...
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Day of Reckoning
Nayantara SahgalEven before Indian writing in English became the fashionable thing it is today, Nayantara Sahgal was a name to reckon with internationally. In Day of Reckoning: Stories, her first ...
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All the Lives We Never Lived
Anuradha RoyFrom the Man Booker Prizenominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter and “one of India’s greatest living authors” (O, The Oprah Magazine), a poignant and sweeping novel set in India du...
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The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories
Arunava Sinha & Various AuthorsThe prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary mag...
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Bel-ami
Guy de Maupassant & Douglas ParmeeYoung, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his friends as BelAmi, is offered a job as a journalist on La Vie francaise and soon makes a great success of his new c...
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No Holding Back
Michael HoldingThe autobiography of West Indies fastbowling legend turned Sky pundit, Michael Holding, author of the awardwinning Why We Kneel, How We RiseAs one of the fastest bowlers the world ...
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Lesser Breeds
Nayantara SahgalIn 1932, Nurullah, a teacher aged twentythree, comes to the city of Akbarabad. He teaches literature to firstyears at the university and encounters a nonviolent resistance movement...
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My Dining Hell
Jay RaynerI have been a restaurant critic for over a decade, written reviews of well over 700 establishments, and if there is one thing I have learnt it is that people like reviews of bad re...
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How To Save Our Planet
Mark A. Maslin'Punchy and to the point. No beating around the bush. This brilliant book contains all the information we need to have in our back pocket in order to move forward' Christiana Figue...
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati RoyNew York Times Best SellerLonglisted for the Man Booker PrizeNamed a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Amazon, Kirkus, The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Hudson GroupA dazzlin...
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Relationship
Nayantara SahgalIn this exchange of letters dating from an extremely turbulent period of their lives, Nayantara Sahgal and E.N. Mangat Rai, two very public figures who had remained at the same tim...
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No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies
Julian Aguon & Arundhati RoyA Michelle Obama Reach Higher Fall 2022 reading list pickA Library Journal "BEST BOOK OF 2022""Aguon’s book is for everyone, but he challenges history by placing indigenous conscio...
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Shadow Princess
Indu SundaresanCritically acclaimed author Indu Sundaresan picks up where she left off in The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, returning to seventeenthcentury India as two princesses strugg...
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Prison and Chocolate Cake
Nayantara Sahgal'Seldom does one get a chance to become acquainted with India's great leaders through a young woman so intimately associated with them.'New York Times Book ReviewA dramatic portrai...
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Chemmeen
T.S Pillai & Anita NairFirst published in 1956, Chemmeen tells the story of the relationship between Karutthamma, a Hindu woman from the fishing community, and Pareekkutty, the son of a Muslim fish whole...
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Spiritual Verses
The Jalaluddin Rumi & Alan WilliamsBegun in 1262 AD, Masnaviye Ma ‘navi, or ‘spiritual couplets', is thought to be the longest singleauthored ‘mystical’ poem ever written. As the spiritual masterpiece of the Persian...
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The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Peter Abelard & Betty RadiceThe story of Abelard and Heloise remains one of the world's most celebrated and tragic love affairs. Through their letters, we follow the path of their romance from its reckless a...
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The Gaze
Elif ShafakA beautiful and compelling novel, Elif Shafak's The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others"I didn't say anything. I didn't return h...
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A Different Sky
Meira ChandSingapore a trading post where different lives jostle and mix. It is 1927, and three young people are starting to question whether this inbetween island can ever truly be their ho...
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Less is More
Jason Hickel'A powerfully disruptive book for disrupted times ... If you're looking for transformative ideas, this book is for you.' KATE RAWORTH, economist and author of Doughnut EconomicsA F...
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China Room
Sunjeev SahotaLONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION'S CARNEGIE MEDALNAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY NPR, TIME, AND THE STARTRIBUNE“Sunjeev Sahota's new...
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Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya'India is an unbroken chain of broken promises.'In 2009, Lalgarh in West Bengal exploded on to the national consciousness. A tribal upsurge against police atrocities escalated into...
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The Flea Palace
Elif ShafakBy turns comic and tragic, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartme...
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Eugene Onegin
Alexander PushkinThis novel in verse, said to be the parent of all Russian novels, is a tragic story of innocence, love and friendship. Eugene Onegin, an aristocrat, much like Pushkin and his peers...
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Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things - Summary
Arundhati Roy"The God of Small Things," written by Indian author Arundhati Roy and published in 1997, is a semiautobiographical novel set in the Indian state of Kerala. The book won the Booker...
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Slow Down
Kohei Saito & Brian Bergstrom"[A] wellreasoned and eyeopening treatise . . . [Kohei Saito makes] a provocative and visionary proposal." Publishers Weekly, (starred review)"Saito’s clarity of thought, plet...
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Incomparable World
S. I. MartinA visceral reimagining of 1780s London, showcasing the untold stories of AfricanAmerican soldiers grappling with their postwar freedom 'Remarkable' David DabydeenIn the years just ...
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A Black Boy at Eton
Dillibe Onyeama'The story [Onyeama] had to tell was so gripping and shocking, it wouldn't let me go . . . A remarkably wellwritten memoir' Bernardine Evaristo, from the IntroductionDillibe was th...
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The Political Imagination
Nayantara SahgalThrough the last five decades, Nayantara Sahgal has constantly responded to the changes that enveloped India and the world through her wideranging works of fiction and nonfiction. ...
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Tales of Two Planets
John FreemanBuilding from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us ...
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Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol & Robert MaguireChichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead s...
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Globalizing Dissent
Ranjan Ghosh & Antonia Navarro-TejeroArundhati Roy is not only an accomplished novelist, but equally gifted in unraveling the politics of globalization, the power and ideology of corporate culture, fundament...
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Bhima Lone Warrior
MT Vasudevan NairThis is the story of Bhima, the second son, always second in line a story never adequately told until one of India's finest writers conjured him up from the silences in Vyasa's na...
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This Time Of Morning
Nayantara SahgalThis unusually prescient novel is set in the early postIndependence years, when a new republic eagerly looks forward to a future full of hope. Rakesh, a Foreign Service officer who...