Mother Mary Comes to Me
ARUNDHATI ROY
The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things.
Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, this is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.
Distraught and even a \"little ashamed\" at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen, Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, surprisingly funny chronicle—unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which has been translated into more than 40 languages and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Roy has also published several works of nonfiction, including The End of Imagination, The Doctor and the Saint, My Seditious Heart and Azadi. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024 the PEN Pinter Prize for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.” She lives in Delhi.
MORE INFORMATION
Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
Published: 4 October 2025
ISBN: 9780241761717
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
Categories: Memoirs