Book review
When India detonated a thermonuclear device in May 1998, Arundhati Roy wrote ‘The End of Imagination’. Since then she has written with clarity, precision and insight about a range of subjects of the utmost importance. This second volume of her collected writing brings together fourteen essays written between June 2002 and November 2004. In these essays she draws the thread of empire through seemingly unconnected arenas, uncovering the links between America’s War on Terror, the growing threat of corporate power, the response of nation states to resistance movements, the role of NGOs, caste and communal politics in India, and the perverse machinery of an increasingly corporatized mass media.

Meticulously researched and carefully argued, The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire is a necessary work for our times.

.ISBN: 0670057614
• Edition: Hardback
• Format: A
• Extent: 432pp
• Classification: Non Fiction


About the author Born in 1961 in Bengal, Arundhati Roy grew up in Kerala. She trained as an architect at the Delhi School of Architecture, but became better known for her complex, scathing film scripts. She wrote and starred in In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, and wrote the script for Pradip Kishen's Electric Moon. Media attention came when she spoke out in suapport of Phoolan Devi, who she felt had been exploited by Shekhar Kapur's film Bandit Queen. The controversy escalated into a court case, after which she retired to private life to work on her first book, The God of Small Things, which was published in 1997. The half-million pound advance on this book, more than Vikram Seth's for A Suitable Boy, shot her to fame again