Twenty years after Arundhati Roy’s game-changing, Booker-winning The God of Small Things, her second novel will be published.

We knew she was working on it, but now – finally – there is concrete news.

Not much is known about the book yet, except that it is named The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and that it will be published in June 2017 by Hamish Hamilton UK and Penguin India.

“I am glad to report that the mad souls (even the wicked ones) in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have found a way into the world, and that I have found my publishers,” said Roy.

Said publishers Simon Prosser (Hamish Hamilton) and Meru Gokhale (Penguin RandomHouse India), “To publish this book is both a pleasure and an honour. What an incredible book it is – on multiple levels; one of the finest we have read in recent times.

"The writing is extraordinary, and so too are the characters – brought to life with such generosity and empathy, in language of the utmost freshness, joyfully reminding us that words are alive too, that they can wake us up and lend us new ways of seeing, feeling, hearing, engaging. It makes the novel new – in the original meaning of novel.”

David Godwin, Roy’s agent, said: “Only Arundhati could have written this novel. Utterly original. It has been 20 years in the making. And well worth the wait.”