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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today it's with an incredible sense of anticipation and joy that I'm about to talk to Arundadi Roy about her new book,

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Many people have been asking questions about the 20 years

between this and her last book, The Guard of Small Things. I think that question has been taken care of a lot of political essay writing.

These essays have been collected largely in a book called The End of Imagination,

published by Haymarket Books.

And this new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is published by Knapp.

It's a very exciting novel, largely because it seems as if the author decided to follow the novel where it would take her.

Is that the case?

I think what I decided was to try and explore how much I could push the edges of what a novel can do.

So I wanted to write a novel which was doing what only a novel can do.

You know, not a novel that wanted to be a film, not a novel that wanted to be repotage, not a novel that wanted to give information or a guidebook.

But how can fiction, how can we push the borders

to try and write about the air we breathe? So it's not that I wanted the novel to, the story

to just take, it's obviously very, very structured, very intricately structured.

...