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Mother Mary Comes to Me
  • Published: 9 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241761724
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
9 Sept 2025
EBook
4 Sept 2025
Audiobook
4 Sept 2025
Hardback
4 Oct 2025
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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.
  • Published: 9 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241761724
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $36.99
Categories:

About the author

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997, and two collections of essays: The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. She lives in New Delhi, India

portrait photo of Arundhati Roy

Also by Arundhati Roy

AZADI
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The Architecture of Modern Empire
My Seditious Heart
Things That Can And Cannot Be Said
The Shape of the Beast
Listening to Grasshoppers
See all

Praise for Mother Mary Comes to Me

Brave and absorbing . . . In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother . . . The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren’t significant for giving us access to Roy’s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency

Guardian

The book has the lyricism of Gabriel García Márquez, the political sweep of Barbara Kingsolver, and the antic family humour of David Sedaris

Financial Times

Truthful, moving, absorbing . . . [Roy] achieves the one thing that any writer’s memoir ought to do: trace the formation of their voice . . . The best piece of non-fiction she has ever written

The Telegraph

Feels like the best kind of fiction

The Economist

Sharp, irreverent, wickedly funny . . . unsettling, bruising, often brutal, yet ultimately life-affirming

BBC News

Beautifully written . . . It is a total pleasure to spend time with Arundhati Roy’s mind and memory in this funny, wise, candid and perceptive memoir

Independent, 'Book of the Month' (5 stars)

Arundhati Roy writes in characteristically dazzling prose . . . This memoir teems with irreverent humour and acerbic, often brilliant insights

Irish Independent

Roy fans, this is the book you’ve been waiting for . . .

The Times

Utterly Absorbing . . . [Roy] Seamlessly blends the personal and the political

The Week

An enthralling memoir, which has all the sweep and verve off her fiction

The Bookseller

Remarkable, fascinating . . . [Mother Mary Comes to Me] shows us, with a gentle and hard-won wisdom, that we do not forget our mothers, or our motherlands, even when we are miles, continents or "worlds" away from them. We carry them with us wherever we go

Elif Shafak, Observer