Mother Mary Comes To Me

By (author) Roy Arundhati
Description:

The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2026

‘Heart-smashed’ by the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen and shaken by the intensity of her response, Arundhati Roy began this remarkable memoir – 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’.

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.

‘I loved Arundhati Roy’s memoir; raw, tender, honest about the ferocity of mother-daughter relationships and the making of a writer’ Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times (Books of the Year)

‘Outstanding. Roy’s life story is truly remarkable’ Nicola Sturgeon, Observer (Books of the Year)

FOYLES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
AUDIBLE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
BLACKWELL''S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
WINNER OF THE GOOGLE PLAY BEST OF 2025 AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2026

Review quote:
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
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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
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The book has the lyricism of Gabriel García Márquez, the political sweep of Barbara Kingsolver, and the antic family humour of David Sedaris
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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
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An outstanding memoir about her early life and relationship with her difficult mother, Mary. Internationally renowned as an extraordinary writer and activist for justice, Roy employs her narrative brilliance to share how she was shaped by her outsider childhood and early adulthood
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Unusually, my book of the year is not a novel – it is Arundhati Roy’s outstanding memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy’s life story is truly remarkable. Her account of it – rooted in her troubled relationship with her mother – affords a real appreciation of the person she became. She shows there is no fixed boundary between fiction and nonfiction in the hands of a skilled writer. Roy rails against injustice and stands up for the values intrinsic to her worldview
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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
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