From the 2002 genocide against Muslims in Gujarat to the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, this extraordinary series of linked essays bravely tracks the fault lines that threaten to destroy India’s precarious secular democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.

Daring to speak out against the lies of both state governments and murderous special interest groups, Arundhati Roy makes a powerful case for the urgency of articulate activism. If nothing is done, she argues, Muslim and Hindu extremists will continue to tear apart both each other and India’s pluralist nation, bringing Pakistan and India ever closer to nuclear war, and making yet worse the undocumented plight of the half of India’s citizens subsisting below the poverty line.

Combining devastating details of torture, rape, terror, cover-ups and government collusion with deft political analysis and passionate conviction, this urgent book asks every reader to have the courage to dream of an alternative to bloodshed, blind nationalism and moral darkness.

Praise for Listening to Grasshoppers

“Roy brings a novelistic readability and immediacy to her impassioned critiques.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Reading Arundhati Roy is how the peace movement arms itself. She turns our grief and rage into courage.”
—Naomi Klein