Arundhati Roy has strong claims for fiction: “To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.”

Making sense of the world is not an obvious way of describing her second novel, 20 years on from the 1997 Man Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things; if anything, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (long-listed for the 2017 award) makes the world’s complications and messiness more evident.