Description

Twenty years, a thousand pages, and now a single beautiful edition of Arundhati Roy’s complete non-fiction.

‘Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time’ Naomi Klein

My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her twenty year journey from the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things to the extraordinary The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: a journey marked by compassion, clarity and courage. Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites.

In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy’s journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from ‘The End of Imagination’, which begins this book, to ‘My Seditious Heart’, with which it ends.

‘The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable’ John Berger

‘Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach’ Noam Chomsky

‘Unflinching emotional as well as political intelligence . . . In an age of intellectual logrolling and mass-manufactured infotainment, she continues to offer bracing ways of seeing, thinking and feeling’ TIME

Publisher Review

Roy is of course a consummate storyteller...[the essays] are thick with intelligence and firmly bolstered with fact. * The Observer * Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings -- Wallace Shawn Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time . . . courageous, visionary, and erudite -- Cornel West The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating * New York Times Book Review * Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays -- Howard Zinn Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach -- Noam Chomsky Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time -- Naomi Klein 'every page gifts you her far seeing, her calm and intelligent urgency, the wisdom and relief of her articulacy, her courage' * Ali Smith *