Best Arundhati Roy Books: Where to Start and What to Read Next
Arundhati Roy has never been easy to ignore. In 2024, Indian authorities invoked the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act against her for remarks she made in 2010 about Kashmir, a decision condemned by activists, journalists, and academics worldwide. That same year, she won the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded to writers who cast an unflinching gaze on the world.
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer, political activist, and the only author to have won the Booker Prize with a debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), which became the best-selling book of the decade by an Indian author still living in India. Born to Mary Roy, a celebrated women’s rights activist, she has spent her career giving voice to those the mainstream would rather not hear: Kashmiris, Dalits, Adivasis, the displaced, and the dispossessed.
Where to start: If you’re new to Roy, begin with The God of Small Things for her fiction, or Azadi if you want to go straight to her political writing. If you want to understand the writer behind both, her 2025 memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the place to start.
1. The God of Small Things: Start Here
Everything can change in the course of the day.
This modern tragedy is a poignant combination of a love story and a family tragedy. It’s a complex yet interesting novel that reflects on cultural differences and caste system still strong in South India. The story also plays upon loss, pain, and revenge between twin siblings named Estha and Rahel, their parents, and other children of the household.
The novel depicts the life experience of a multi-generational Keralite Syrian Christian family living near Cochin who faced many tragedies by the injustice of caste-phobia, especially because they got involved with an untouchable.
Worldwide tragedies are put in contrast to personal tragedies, and how both affect the lives of people involved in them. The novel is laced with flashbacks which set the tempo for every next scene. Each incident in the past forebodes the future and a string of small incidents leading to bigger events and consequences.
Read this if: you want to understand modern India through a story, and and you don’t mind a narrative that works on you slowly.
Tim’s review of The God of Small Things offers useful context for understanding the culturally challenged society it depicts.
2. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: For Readers Ready to Go Deeper
She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.
The novel opens in a graveyard where we are introduced to Anjum, a Hijra (third gender), who is shunned by the judgemental society. She decides to live her life in Khwabgah, a home for Hijras.
It is not an easy read and there’s no tidy beginning, middle, and end. Instead it moves between conflicts: the Kashmir crisis, 9/11, Hindu fundamentalism, Maoist uprisings, inter-caste marriages, tribal land enclosures. Roy has become the voice of the faceless and marginalized, divided by caste and religion.
This complex yet provocative novel rewards a slow, fragment-by-fragment read.
Read this if: you’ve already read The God of Small Things and want to see Roy take on the full weight of contemporary India in one sprawling novel.
Rashid’s Javed Ahmed’s review of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is concise and witty and full of praise for the author’s farsightedness and keen observation.
3. The End of Imagination: Her Essential Early Essays
There is no terrorism like state terrorism. People rarely win wars; governments rarely lose them.
The End of Imagination is a collection of five of Roy’s finest nonfiction speeches and essays spanning from 1999 (India’s jobless growth and Hindu nationalism) to 2004 (War on Terror era).
Roy frames The End of Imagination as a summary of major political events of that decade, with particular attention to nuclear programs, the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the dam-building debate in India, and corporate globalization.
If you want a neutral, eye-opening stance on the most important global events of that era, this is and essential read.
Read this if: you want to understand how Roy thinks before diving into her later, more charged essay collections.
According to JJ Wilson in his review of The End of Imagination, Arundhati is a hero who wears a sari instead of a cape.
4. AZADI: On Kashmir and Hindu Nationalism
If anyone knows In which language does rain fall over tormented cities.
AZADI, the Urdu word for freedom, is the slogan of Kashmiri people who have been seeking self-determination since the partition of 1947. It is also the cry of millions of Indians protesting Hindu nationalism at home.
Roy takes both meanings seriously in this collection of essays focused on events from 2018 to 2020: the revocation of Article 370, the communication lockdown in Kashmir, and the Modi administration’s treatment of Indian Muslims.
Roy uses her platform to present hard facts to readers who might not otherwise engage with political reportage.
Read this if: you want Roy at her most urgent and most directly political, and you want to understand the Kashmir crisis beyond headlines.
One may agree or disagree with Roy’s arguments, but the facts she presents are difficult to dismiss.
5. Capitalism: A Ghost Story: Her Most Politically Charged
Do we need more weapons to fight wars or do we need wars to create markets for weapons.
If you are a fan of ethical capitalism, then this book might change your outlook. It’s a slim but pointed collection of anti-capitalist essays (less than a hundred pages) targeting the neoliberal rule of India’s industrialists, politicians, and entrepreneurs.
The title does not refer to supernatural fiction but to the thousands of farmers who died by suicide, rivers poisoned by industrial waste, and forests cleared for profit. Roy examines how major media outlets serve elite interests, how NGOs have come to dominate civil society, and how natural resources have been quietly privatised.
Due to her stance on Kashmir within the book, Roy came close to being arrested.
Read this if: you’re interested in the political economy behind the human stories Roy tells elsewhere.
Apeksha’s review of Capitalism – A Ghost Story summarizes the themes well. The novel received mixed critical responses, which is reason enough to read it and decide for yourself.
6. Mother Mary Comes to Me: Her Most Personal Book
She was my shelter and my storm.
Written after the death of her mother Mary Roy in 2022, this memoir traces Roy’s path from Kerala to Delhi; her early years, her complicated relationship with the formidable woman that was her mother, and her gradual becoming of a writer.
The narrative moves between family conflict, boarding school, legal battles, and the slow discovery of her own voice. It is the most personal book Roy has written, and for many readers, the most surprising.
The memoir won the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award and was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
Read this if: you want to understand the person behind the politics or if you’re reading Roy for the first time and want to start with the ‘writer’ before the ‘activist’.
Boby Jose’s review of Mother Mary Comes to Me is personal and grounded since he also grew up in the same Kerala landscape Roy describes, which gives his reading an intimacy most critics can’t bring to it.
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