Mother Mary Comes to Me
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“Arundhati Roy’s moving performance illuminates her tumultuous experience of being raised in India by her fierce mother…Moments of quiet humor and an absence of self-pity add to the richness of Roy’s account…an insightful exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and India’s culture.”
AudioFile
A New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction
A Sunday Times (London) Bestseller
A New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year
An Amazon Best Books of the Year Pick
A Minneapolis Star-Tribune Pick of 2025's Best Books
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
A Time Magazine Best Book of 2025
The Independent (London) Best Book of the Year
The Guardian (London) Best Book of the Year
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”
And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.
With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 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.
Praise