REVIEWS

Jennifer Byrne is the host of The Book Club on ABC TV.

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS by Arundhati Roy, Hamish Hamilton.

It’s the book we have been waiting for: Arundhati Roy’s second novel, arriving 20 years after her Bookerwinning The God of Small Things, exploring class, caste and family secrets in Roy’s home-state of Kerala. Her canvas is broader this time, sweeping from a transgender community founded in a Delhi graveyard by a hijra (someone born with both male and female sex organs), to the fighting fields of Kashmir, where three friends get caught up in the independence struggle. She still writes like an angel and manages to tie her two stories together – one a human tale of outsiders striving to build their own form of family, the other focusing more on India’s political failures. Yet all are struggling to achieve the “utmost happiness”.

HAVANA: A SUBTROPICAL DELIRIUM by Mark Kurlansky, Bloomsbury.

He’s made bestsellers of such unlikely subjects as salt and cod, so I picked up Mark Kurlansky’s latest, on the Cuban capital of Havana, with high anticipation. And an excellent job he’s done, evoking a city of heat and history, music and politics, pirates and slaves and prostitutes – a place both gloriously colonial and hopelessly ramshackle which is nonetheless “the most romantic city in the world”. Travellers have heard for years that one must “get there before Castro goes”, before tourism takes over, but Havana reminds us of how many lives this city has had since Christopher Columbus, in 1492, sailed the ocean blue to declare Cuba “the most beautiful that eyes have ever seen”. The book is beautifully packaged with the author’s own drawings.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON by David Grann, Simon & Schuster.

This gripping true story of greed, murder and race starts in the 1920s, when oil was discovered on the land of the Osage Indians of Oklahoma. Almost overnight they became the richest people in the world, a state of affairs which so distressed white Americans they conspired to rob them of their wealth. When intermarriage worked too slowly, they used shotguns, poison and explosives to kill their own wives and relatives. This is also the story of the early years of the FBI, which stepped in after years of bungled prosecutions to confirm the murder of dozens of Osage – though fresh research by David Grann (who also wrote The Lost City of Z, soon to be a major movie) suggests the true number who died was in the hundreds. A riveting book.

THE AMAZING STORY OF THE MAN WHO CYCLED FROM INDIA TO EUROPE FOR LOVE by Per J Andersson, Oneworld.

Everything about this true-life romance runs long: its title, the full name of its hero (373 letters!), and the bicycle journey he took to be reunited with the Swedish tourist, Charlotte, he met in Delhi in 1975. It is the unlikely story of a cute meet – she asked him to sketch her portrait – and a whirwind romance, culminating in a tribal marriage. But Charlotte had to return home, leaving her unofficial husband known as PK to work out how to bridge the 7000 kilometres separating them. Flying was out of the question so he got on his bike and peddled like fury. He crossed countries and continents and this story of how he made it, and how they are still together 40 years on with two children, is as charming as any fairy tale.