FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF MY SEDITIOUS HEART AND THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, A NEW AND PRESSING DISPATCH FROM THE HEART OF THE CROWD AND THE SOLITUDE OF A WRITER’S DESK

The chant of ‘Azadi!’ – Urdu for ‘Freedom!’ – is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism.

Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom – a chasm or a bridge? – the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The Coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could.

In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism.

The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.
ISBN: 9780241470022
Publisher: PENGUIN

ISBN: 9781591845942
Publisher: PENGUIN

One hot afternoon in a remote Bangladeshi village, a telegram arrives for Maya Haque. Eight years before, a devastating war tore Maya s country and her family apart. Now she realises it is time to return home at last. Maya arrives to find that everything has changed. Her old friends have been seduced by the lure of new money, her city s streets have been renamed and the freedom she had once yearned for is a long-forgotten dream. Worst of all, her beloved brother Sohail has become a stranger to her, abandoning his liberal beliefs to become a strict religious leader. As she attempts to come to terms with her brother s radicalism, Maya will be forced to rethink what it means to be a good daughter, sister, friend and citizen and to be a good Muslim. She must decide where her loyalties ultimately lie. Set in the dusty streets of Dhaka and the villages and river-islands of rural Bangladesh, at a time when the rise of religious fundamentalism was a whisper in the wind, The Good Muslim is an epic, unforgettable story of the challenges of peace in the long shadow of war. It is a novel that cleaves to the simple truths that shape all of our lives: that the bonds of family and love often strain to bear the weight of history.
ISBN: 9780670082896
Publisher: PENGUIN