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Roy trained as an architect, never practised, won the Booker with her first novel at thirty-five, and then did not publish another novel for twenty years. That is usually told as a silence. It was not: she spent those two decades writing about dams and displacement, nuclear tests, Kashmir, caste and corporate power, in essays that made her the most argued-about writer in India. She rejects the label “writer-activist”: saying what you think, in her view, is simply the writer’s job. Two novels, one memoir, and a shelf of non-fiction that keeps getting repackaged. This guide has every Arundhati Roy book in order, what each one is, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 2 novels · 1 memoir · ~20 works of non-fiction · Female Authors · 1997–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Arundhati Roy has written two novels, The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017); a memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025); and roughly twenty books of non-fiction, from The End of Imagination (1998) to The Architecture of Modern Empire (2024). Many of the essay books recollect the same pieces under new titles, and five more are single lectures or books she made with other people. Mother Mary Comes to Me won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in March 2026. Start with The God of Small Things; for the essays in one volume, My Seditious Heart (2019). All her books in order →
Where to Start with Arundhati Roy
If you have never read her
The God of Small Things
Go slowly: the first fifty pages deliberately withhold the shape of the story, and everything lands once you understand what is being circled.
if you want the politics…
Listening to Grasshoppers, or My Seditious Heart if you would rather have it all at once. Start with a single essay if a thousand pages is too much.
if you want to understand the second novel…
Read the essays first. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness assumes you know what she has been arguing about Kashmir and caste for twenty years.
if you want to know where she came from…
Mother Mary Comes to Me, the 2025 memoir about her mother. It is the origin story for the temperament.
if it is the reporting that interests you…
Broken Republic, and then my best investigative journalism books list for writers working in the same tradition.
Arundhati Roy Books in Order, from 1997 to 2025
The God of Small Things
Start hereFraternal twins Estha and Rahel in Ayemenem, Kerala, in two timeframes: their childhood in 1969 and their reunion as adults in 1993. Between them lie their mother Ammu’s forbidden affair with Velutha, an untouchable carpenter, and the drowning of their English cousin Sophie Mol. It won the Booker Prize and turned a first-time novelist into the best-known Indian writer in English of her generation.
The prose is the reason. She writes childhood from inside a child’s grammar — invented words, repetitions, things named wrong on purpose — and then lets the adult world arrive and destroy it. Nearly thirty years on it has not softened.
— LisanneThe End of Imagination
Written weeks after India’s 1998 nuclear tests, and the essay that ended her career as a merely literary figure. Published as a standalone booklet. A completely different 2016 book carries the same title; see the collections below.
back to the shelfThe Greater Common Good
On the Narmada valley dams and the hundreds of thousands displaced by them — the piece that took her into the movement rather than merely writing about it.
back to the shelfPower Politics
Essays on privatisation, big dams and the writer’s place in a country selling off its commons. An expanded second edition followed in 2002.
back to the shelfWar Talk
Written after the Gujarat violence and into the American war on terror. It contains “Confronting Empire”, her January 2003 speech at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, which ends with another world being on her way.
back to the shelfAn Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire
On American power, occupation and the vocabulary states use to make war sound like administration.
back to the shelfListening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Eleven essays from 2002 to 2008 on what happens to a democracy that keeps holding elections while dismantling everything else. Published in the United States with the title and subtitle reversed, as Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. The most sustained argument she has made in non-fiction, and the one that best rewards being read as a book rather than as separate pieces.
back to the shelfBroken Republic: Three Essays
Three long pieces on the Maoist insurgency in central India, including “Walking with the Comrades”, written after weeks in the forest with the guerrillas. Reporting rather than commentary: she went and stayed, and the book is better for the discomfort of it.
back to the shelfCapitalism: A Ghost Story
On Indian billionaires, their foundations, and the way philanthropy launders the thing that produced it. Expanded from a 2012 magazine essay. “A Ghost Story” is the whole subtitle; there is no longer one.
back to the shelfThe Doctor and the Saint
Written in 2014 as the book-length introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, arguing that Gandhi’s record on caste has been sanctified beyond what it can bear. Issued on its own in 2017 as The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. The most contested thing she has written in India; read Ambedkar alongside it.
back to the shelfThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Anjum, a hijra, leaves the House of Dreams in Old Delhi and makes a home in a graveyard. Around her the novel gathers Kashmir, the Gujarat violence, the Maoist forests and a foundling nobody will claim. Sprawling, angry and structurally nothing like her first. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Her second novel, twenty years after the first.
It divided people, and the objection — that it is not a novel so much as everything she has argued for twenty years poured into one — is fair and also beside the point. Read it after the essays rather than after the first novel.
— LisanneAzadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.
On Kashmir after the revocation of its special status, on language and nationalism, and including “The Pandemic Is a Portal”, first published in April 2020, in the early weeks of the pandemic.
back to the shelfMother Mary Comes to Me
NewestHer first memoir, about her mother Mary Roy: teacher, founder of a school in Kerala, the woman who took Syrian Christian women’s inheritance rights to the Indian Supreme Court and won, and someone almost impossible to live with. Roy has described it as a book about how her mother made her the kind of writer she is, and then resented it. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in March 2026, was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, was named Blackwell’s and Foyles’ Book of the Year 2025, and was one of the New York Times’s ten best books of 2025.
The book that explains the temperament. Anyone who has wondered where the refusal to back down comes from will find it here.
— LisanneTwo Traps in the Arundhati Roy Bibliography
- Same title, different book. The 1998 essay The End of Imagination is a booklet of about eighty pages. The 2016 End of Imagination is an omnibus of the earlier essay collections, with that essay inside it. Search for the title and you will be sold the second one.
- Different titles, same book. Listening to Grasshoppers is Field Notes on Democracy in the United States, with the title and subtitle swapped round.
- One long essay, sold twice. “Walking with the Comrades” is one of the three essays in Broken Republic (2011) and is also a book of its own (Penguin, 2011). You do not need both.
- The way out. If you want the essays without the duplication, buy My Seditious Heart (2019), which collects nearly all of them.
The Rest of the Bibliography: Collections, Conversations, and Eight Books Most Lists Miss
Two things live down here. First, the collections: Roy’s non-fiction is heavily repackaged, and the same essays appear across several books under different covers, so it is worth knowing which is which before you buy. Second, eight books that most bibliographies leave out altogether — a lecture, a piece of reporting sold on its own, the screenplay in book form, and four volumes she shares with other writers.
Open a group to see the titles.
Essay collections
4
The Cost of Living 1999
Collects The Greater Common Good and The End of Imagination.
Bookshop.org and more
The Algebra of Infinite Justice 2001
The UK and India collection of the early essays, with a new title piece.
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The End of Imagination 2016
The omnibus, not the 1998 essay of the same name. It gathers the earlier essay collections — including the 1998 title piece — with a new introduction. This is the edition the shops stock, so a search for the title will bring you here rather than to the 1998 booklet.
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My Seditious Heart 2019
About a thousand pages collecting two decades of non-fiction. If you want the essays in one volume, buy this rather than the individual titles.
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Single pieces, and books shared with others
7
Public Power in the Age of Empire 2004
A lecture at the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, published on its own by Seven Stories Press.
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13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament 2006
The Penguin reader that came before the 2013 book, on the same case.
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War With No End 2007
A Verso book she shares with John Berger, Naomi Klein, Hanif Kureishi, Joe Sacco, Ahdaf Soueif, Haifa Zangana and others. One chapter is hers.
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Walking with the Comrades 2011
The weeks she spent in the forest with Maoist guerrillas, published as a book of its own by Penguin in October 2011. The same reporting is the centrepiece of Broken Republic, so you do not need both.
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom 2011
A Verso book she shares with Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji and Pankaj Mishra. Her contribution is one part of it.
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The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament 2013
A Penguin India book credited to Roy, gathering essays and documents on the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and the execution of Afzal Guru in February 2013.
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Things that Can and Cannot Be Said 2016
Essays and conversations with the actor John Cusack, published by Haymarket, around their meeting with Edward Snowden in Moscow.
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The screenplay, in print
1
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: The Original Screenplay 2026 edition
Her 1989 screenplay, published as a book by Penguin India and reissued by India Penguin in March 2026 with new introductions by Roy, the director Pradip Krishen, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of the Film Heritage Foundation. A restored version of the film was selected for the Classics section of the 2026 Berlin Film Festival; Roy withdrew from the festival in protest at the jury’s remarks on Gaza. It is the most recent thing she has put her name to.
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Conversations
3
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile 2004
Interviews with David Barsamian.
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The Shape of the Beast 2008
A book of conversations with Roy.
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The Architecture of Modern Empire 2024
Conversations with David Barsamian, with a foreword by Naomi Klein.
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Quick facts about Arundhati Roy
- Born
- 24 November 1961, Shillong, north-east India
- Trained as
- An architect, at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Never practised
- Known for
- The God of Small Things (1997), her debut
- Booker Prize
- 1997, for The God of Small Things
- The gap
- Twenty years between her two novels, 1997 to 2017
- Also writes
- Political non-fiction on dams, nuclear weapons, Kashmir, caste and empire
- Books
- 2 novels, 1 memoir, and roughly twenty works of non-fiction, several of which recollect earlier essays under new titles
- Screenplays
- In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992). The first was published as a book, and reissued by India Penguin in March 2026 with a new introduction by Roy
- Other honours
- Lannan Cultural Freedom Award (2002); Sydney Peace Prize (2004); Norman Mailer Prize (2011); European Essay Prize (2023); PEN Pinter Prize (2024); National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography (2025); Blackwell’s and Foyles’ Book of the Year (2025); Mathrubhumi Book of the Year (2026)
- Gave two back
- The National Film Award for Best Screenplay, presented in 1989 for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and returned in November 2015 in protest; and the 2005 Sahitya Akademi Award for The Algebra of Infinite Justice, which she refused
- Lives
- Delhi
Arundhati Roy’s Writing Style: The Same Voice in Both Registers
The usual line on Roy is that there are two of her — the novelist and the polemicist — and that the second interrupted the first. Read them together and that does not hold. The essays use the techniques of the fiction: repetition, deliberate mis-naming, lists that accumulate until they become an accusation, sudden shifts of scale from a government policy to one family’s kitchen. She is doing the same thing in both, which is refusing the official vocabulary.
In The God of Small Things that shows as invented grammar. The novel is narrated largely through the perception of seven-year-olds, so words get capitalised strangely, run together, or reversed; the prose is doing what the children are doing, trying to make language hold something too big for it.
The essays are plainer but not calmer. Her method there is to take a phrase everyone uses without thinking — development, progress, collateral damage, the greater common good — and hold it still long enough for the reader to see what it is covering. That is why the titles keep being ironic.
And she does not do detachment. She names people, quantifies displacement, states what she thinks should happen. It has cost her a day in jail in March 2002, for contempt of court over what she wrote in her own affidavit in the case, and a complaint over a 2010 speech in which she said Kashmir was not an integral part of India — on which the Delhi Lieutenant Governor granted sanction in June 2024, fourteen years later, to prosecute her under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. She has never adjusted the register to make it stop.
If that is the register you want more of, the closest writers on my shelf are Katherine Boo, who reported one Mumbai settlement for more than three years, and Svetlana Alexievich. For the argument about caste in The Doctor and the Saint, read it beside Isabel Wilkerson. For the memoir, the shelf it belongs on is memoirs and biographies, next to Annie Ernaux and Mary Karr.
Watch
“It’s our job to be unpopular”: Roy on what a writer is for
Filmed by Louisiana Channel at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and released in June 2018. Short, and not a book-promotion interview: she talks about the writer’s duty to say what she really thinks, not as an activist but as a writer, and about what happens to literature when writers become a commodity.
Frequently asked questions about Arundhati Roy’s books
How many books has Arundhati Roy written?
Two novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017); one memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025); and roughly twenty works of non-fiction, several of which recollect earlier essays under new titles.
How many novels has Arundhati Roy written?
Two: The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), twenty years apart. Everything else she has published is non-fiction, apart from her screenplays and her 2025 memoir.
What was Arundhati Roy’s first book?
The God of Small Things, published in 1997, which won the Booker Prize that year. Before it she wrote screenplays, among them In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), which only appeared in book form later.
What books did Arundhati Roy publish in 2014?
Two. Capitalism: A Ghost Story, from Haymarket Books, expanded from a 2012 magazine essay; “A Ghost Story” is the whole subtitle. And The Doctor and the Saint, her long introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, published by Navayana in March 2014. It came out as a book of its own in 2017, subtitled Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi.
Does Arundhati Roy have an official website?
No. Roy does not run an author website of her own, so there is no official list of her books. Her publishers, Penguin and Hamish Hamilton in India and Haymarket Books in the United States, each list their own editions. This page brings them together: two novels, a memoir and her non-fiction in order, plus the books most lists leave out.
Who is Arundhati Roy?
An Indian novelist and essayist, born in 1961 and best known for The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Besides two novels and a memoir she has written around twenty works of political non-fiction, on dams, nuclear weapons, Kashmir, caste and corporate power.
When and where was Arundhati Roy born?
On 24 November 1961 in Shillong, in north-east India. After her parents divorced she grew up in Kerala with her mother, Mary Roy, and her brother. The village of Ayemenem, where the family came from, is the setting of The God of Small Things.
Where does Arundhati Roy live now?
In Delhi, the city she moved to at sixteen to study architecture. She is still writing and speaking in public: in February 2026 she withdrew from the Berlin Film Festival over the jury’s remarks on Gaza, and in March 2026 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir.
Why is Arundhati Roy controversial?
Because she says plainly what she thinks about the Indian state. In March 2002 she spent a day in jail for contempt of court over her own affidavit in the Narmada dam case. A 2010 speech in which she said Kashmir was not an integral part of India led, in June 2024, to sanction to prosecute her under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Her essay on Gandhi and caste, The Doctor and the Saint, is among the most contested things she has written.
Is Arundhati Roy related to Prannoy Roy or Anuradha Roy?
Prannoy Roy, the co-founder of NDTV, is her cousin: both are grandchildren of Paresh Lal Roy, known as the father of Indian boxing. The novelist Anuradha Roy is no relation. Her mother was the educator and activist Mary Roy, a Syrian Christian from Kerala, and her father a Bengali Hindu tea planter. Her brother is Lalith Kumar Roy.
Was Arundhati Roy married?
She married the filmmaker Pradip Krishen in the 1980s. He directed In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and Electric Moon from her screenplays. They later separated.
What is The God of Small Things about?
It follows fraternal twins Estha and Rahel across two timeframes — their childhood in 1969 and their reunion as adults in 1993 — in Ayemenem, Kerala. The central events turn on a forbidden love affair between their divorced mother Ammu and Velutha, an untouchable carpenter, and on the drowning of their visiting English cousin, Sophie Mol.
Why was there a twenty-year gap between her novels?
It was a change of form rather than a silence. After the Booker win in 1997 Roy turned to political non-fiction, on dams and displacement, nuclear weapons, Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency and corporate power. She rejects the label “writer-activist”, and sees saying what she thinks as part of the writer’s job. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness appeared in 2017.
What has Mother Mary Comes to Me won?
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, announced on 26 March 2026 for the 2025 publishing year. It was also shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, which Lyse Doucet won, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, was Blackwell’s and Foyles’ Book of the Year 2025, and was named one of the ten best books of 2025 by the New York Times.
Which Arundhati Roy books are missing from most lists?
Eight. Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), a lecture published on its own; 13 December, a Reader (2006) and The Hanging of Afzal Guru (2013), both on the attack on the Indian Parliament; War With No End (2007) and Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011), two Verso volumes she shares with other writers; Walking with the Comrades (2011), the forest reporting as a book of its own; Things that Can and Cannot Be Said (2016), with John Cusack; and her 1989 screenplay In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, in print and reissued in March 2026. They are all on this page.
What is Arundhati Roy’s newest book?
Her newest new writing is Mother Mary Comes to Me, the memoir about her mother Mary Roy, published on 28 August 2025. Her newest publication is more recent than that: in March 2026 India Penguin reissued her 1989 screenplay In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones as a book, with a new introduction by her.
Was Arundhati Roy an architect?
She trained as one but never practised. She studied at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. Her screenplay In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) drew on that architecture-school world and won a National Film Award for Best Screenplay, which she returned in 2015 in protest. The screenplay was published as a book, and reissued in March 2026.
Which Arundhati Roy essay collection should I buy?
My Seditious Heart (2019), if you want nearly all of it in one volume. Otherwise start with Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), the collection that works best as a book.
Footnotes
- Arundhati Roy — Wikipedia
- The God of Small Things — Wikipedia
- Mother Mary Comes to Me — Wikipedia
- Listening to Grasshoppers — Wikipedia
- The Doctor and the Saint — Wikipedia
- The Algebra of Infinite Justice — Wikipedia
- Capitalism: A Ghost Story — Haymarket Books
- The Architecture of Modern Empire — Haymarket Books
- Arundhati Roy: The Role of the Writer — Louisiana Channel
- Winners for publishing year 2025 — National Book Critics Circle (Autobiography, 26 March 2026)
- The 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist — Women’s Prize
- Things that Can and Cannot Be Said — Haymarket Books (with John Cusack, 2016)
- Walking with the Comrades — Wikipedia (Penguin, 25 October 2011)
- Arundhati Roy’s run-ins with the government — Outlook India (the refused Sahitya Akademi Award, the 2002 contempt conviction, the 2024 UAPA sanction)
- Blackwell’s and Foyles Book of the Year, NBCC and Women’s Prize shortlist — The Daily Star (28 March 2026)
- Why Arundhati Roy pulled out of Berlinale 2026 — The Federal (14 February 2026)
- Paresh Lal Roy — Wikipedia (grandfather of Arundhati Roy and Prannoy Roy)
- Anuradha Roy — La Procure (no relation to Arundhati Roy)
Bibliography last verified 28 September 2026. Publication years follow the first edition; several titles appeared a year apart in India, the UK and the US, and a few of the non-fiction books are volumes she shares with other writers, which is said on the entry itself.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
— Arundhati Roy, “Confronting Empire”, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 2003; collected in War Talk
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