To say (Arundhati) Roy's latest venture into fiction has been long awaited is an understatement. An instant best seller, The God of Small Things -- which Junot Daz calls "one of the single most important novels written in English" -- won the Man Booker Prize and quickly went on to become a global literary phenomenon. After working on the new novel for ten years, last August Roy texted her British agent, David Godwin, with one word: "Done.' Godwin got on the first plane to Delhi. He was nervous when she handed him the manuscript. "But then I read the opening,' he says, "and thought, Yeah, we're back."

When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness comes out this month, it will be published in 30 countries.From the novel's beginning -- "She lived in the graveyard like a tree" -- one is swept up in the story. "She" is Anjum, born a hermaphrodite in Old Delhi, who, after being raised as a boy named Aftab, goes to live as a woman in a nearby home for hijras (the South Asian term for transgender women). Headstrong and magnetic, she becomes the spokesperson for the hijra community. But after barely surviving a Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, Anjum renounces everything to set up a solitary new life in a cemetery, where she builds a guesthouse among the gravestones that gradually becomes home to a colorful cast of characters.

.. 20 Years After The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Read the interview here.