WHAT’S GOING ON: It’s been almost exactly 20 years since the release of Arundhati Roy’s first novel, “The God of Small Things,” about a scandal-plagued Indian family, which went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize and spent nearly a year as a New York Times best seller. Roy hasn’t been reclusive since then — she’s protested against the Indian state and written a number of political treatises — but as the years stretched into decades with no second novel in sight, readers could be forgiven for wondering if she was going to be, like Margaret Mitchell or Ralph Ellison, a one-hit wonder. So the arrival at long last of a follow-up, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 7), is being heralded as a bit of a second coming: It appeared on the Book Review’s cover this month, and Roy has been the subject of admiring profiles in India and England and the United States. Not that she embraces the attention. “I was never a person who thought, Now that I’m famous, I’ll go live in London or New York and live the dream,” she told The Guardian. “I’m a social cripple in a cocktail party. My idea of a nightmare is people standing very elegantly dressed in a room with a drink in their hand. I’m just like, urghh!”

If the title to “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” casts it as a kind of mirror image to “The God of Small Things” — here a major bureaucracy, there a minor deity — that may be intentional. Roy hoped to avoid repeating herself with another family novel, she told The Guardian, but still tried to capture her own experiences: “I wanted to write where I’m just drifting around, the way I do in Delhi, in mosques and strange places, as I have all my life. Just delighting in all the crazies and the sweethearts, and the joy in the saddest places, and the unexpectedness of things.” She added: “I never want to walk past anyone; I want to sit down and have a cigarette and say, ‘Hey man, what’s going on? How is it?’ That is, I think, the book.”

DANCING WITH THE STARS: The actor and comedian Kevin Hart enters the hardcover nonfiction list right at the top with a vaguely inspirational memoir called “I Can’t Make This Up.” In it, he recalls the time he and a friend considered earning money as exotic dancers. “We went to the bathroom, doused ourselves in baby oil, and changed into our stripper outfits. When we emerged, we looked more like victims of a fraternity prank than hot strippers, plus we’d gotten oil stains all over our bow ties. … That was the end of my stripper days.”