My Seditious Heart
ARUNDHATI ROY
HAMISH HAMILTON, 1,040 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 020 7799 4064

What to do when someone’s style puts you off, though what she is saying is convincing and necessary?

There’s no doubting Arundhati Roy’s passion for denouncing injustice. Every one of these 45 essays (originally published between 1998 and 2016) is a fervent cry against the ruling powers in India, war or the Anglo-Saxon economic model. As well as inveighing against the catastrophic destruction of rural communities and the environment caused by “development” (especially large dams), Roy decries India’s caste system, its nuclear weapons, its murderous war of repression in Kashmir, its privatisations and the corruption of its political and business elite.

Her bête-noire is Narendra Modi – winner of a second general election in May – whom Roy sees as an unscrupulous “fascist”, whose modus operandi is to stir up nationalist and sectarian hatred in order to secure power for himself and his billionaire backers, part of “the complicated waltz between corporate globalisation and medieval [Hindu] religious fundamentalism”.