A few weeks after India detonated a thermonuclear device in 1998, Arundhati Roy wrote the essay The End of Imagination, in which she said: My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing. The essay, as have all its successors, attracted worldwide attention, debate and acclaim. In the years since, the essays she has published in magazines and newspapers worldwide have reinforced an impression of a writer in the modern world prepared to use her fame and gifts in the cause of the voiceless and the overlooked. Those essays are gathered together here. Carefully revealed and closely argued, they demand to be read and discussed; they dispute, they challenge, they provoke and they uplift.