Arundhati Roy Books in Order

Mother Mary Comes to Me is Roy's memoir of her mother, Mary Roy, and of growing up in Kerala, weaving scenes of family conflict, legal battles and boarding-school escapes with reflections on writing, love, faith and the making of both a daughter and a country.

Azadi collects late-2010s essays on the rise of Hindu nationalism, the Kashmir freedom slogan, protest movements and the COVID-19 pandemic, as Roy asks what freedom can mean in an India shaped by surveillance, inequality and creeping authoritarianism.

Spanning more than two decades, My Seditious Heart gathers nearly a thousand pages of Roy's nonfiction on dams, nuclear weapons, caste, communal violence, Kashmir and global capitalism, tracing how India has changed since her Booker-winning debut.

Roy's second novel follows Anjum, an intersex woman who builds a community in a Delhi graveyard, and Tilo, an architect drawn into the conflict in Kashmir. Their intersecting lives reveal an India marked by dispossession, surveillance and small, stubborn acts of care.

A short book-length essay, The Doctor and the Saint reads the debate between B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi on caste, race and representation, asking how Gandhi's image was built and why Ambedkar's radical challenge was pushed to the margins.

Co-written with John Cusack, this slim volume braids conversations with Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg into a meditation on secrecy, surveillance and empire, asking what can be spoken aloud in a world structured by militarism and managed information.

This omnibus brings together five of Roy's major essay collections, from The Cost of Living and Power Politics to War Talk and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, tracing her arguments against nuclear nationalism, mega-dams, US wars and corporate power.

In Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Roy explores how corporate wealth, philanthropy and media power shape Indian democracy, linking glittering skyscrapers and luxury towers to dispossession, farmer suicides, militarised regions and the quiet capture of public institutions.

This book revisits the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and the execution of Afzal Guru, assembling court documents, commentary and essays to question how the investigation was conducted and what his hanging means for democracy, media and due process.

In Walking with the Comrades, Roy treks into the forests of central India to live with Maoist guerrillas and Adivasi villagers, documenting how a war over land, minerals and state power plays out far from India's shining cities.

This slim volume on Kashmir's struggle for self-determination gathers essays by several writers, including Roy's piece on the slogan Azadi, to trace the region's history, military occupation and the gap between official narratives and life on the ground.

Broken Republic brings together essays on the Maoist insurgency in central India, the displacement of Adivasi communities for mining and dams, and the Indian state's counterinsurgency campaigns, asking what development looks like to those standing in its path.

Listening to Grasshoppers collects essays written in the 2000s about democracy in India, from pogroms and election campaigns to hunger, dispossession and the language of nationalism, arguing that formal voting can coexist with deepening violence and exclusion.

The Shape of the Beast gathers long interviews with Roy about big dams, Gujarat, Kashmir, American wars and the Naxalite conflict, as well as her own life, offering a conversational tour through the ideas that underlie her fiction and essays.

This multi-author collection, which includes a contribution from Roy, examines the so-called war on terror from Afghanistan and Iraq to civil liberties at home, linking distant battlefields to surveillance, propaganda and the erosion of democratic guarantees.

Public Power in the Age of Empire prints a major speech in which Roy reflects on global movements against war and privatisation, asking what public power might mean when corporations, militaries and compliant governments seem to hold all the cards.

Come September is the text of Roy's 2002 lecture delivered in the United States, a wide-ranging reflection on September 11, earlier coups and wars, and the relationship between grief, empire, nationalism and resistance in an age of permanent conflict.

This essay collection tracks the early years of the US war on terror, corporate globalisation and new security laws, as Roy speaks to protest crowds and reading audiences about how ordinary people can recognise and resist empire in everyday life.

War Talk gathers Roy's early-2000s essays on nuclear brinkmanship in South Asia, the Gujarat pogrom, and the US-led war on terror, questioning how nationalism, religion and globalisation feed militarism while ordinary people live with the consequences.

This volume of conversations with David Barsamian ranges across dams, privatisation, nuclear weapons, US foreign policy and media spin, using the contrast in its title to show how financial pressure and military force work together inside today's global order.

One of Roy's first essay collections, The Algebra of Infinite Justice examines India's nuclear tests, big dam projects, multinational corporations and the war on terror, arguing that official ideas of progress and justice often mask violence and dispossession.

War Is Peace is Roy's extended essay on the US-led attack on Afghanistan after September 11, tracing a long history of interventions and asking how language, media and selective mourning allow war to be sold as a defence of freedom.

Power Politics focuses on the privatisation of electricity and water in India, especially the role of foreign companies and massive dam projects, showing how technical language hides the displacement of millions of poor and low-caste people.

Roy's first nonfiction book pairs a long report on the Narmada Valley dam projects with a fierce critique of India's nuclear tests, arguing that both development and security are being pursued at the expense of the poor and of the future.

Set in Kerala in the late 1960s and 1990s, The God of Small Things follows twins Estha and Rahel as a childhood tragedy ripples through their family. The novel braids caste, forbidden love and memory into a nonlinear story of how small choices can shatter lives.