Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

STAFF REVIEW

Arundhati Roy is an author I have admired for years with both her award winning fiction and her political and activist writings. With her new book, we see Arundhati grow from a young girl into the powerhouse woman she is today. The book centres on the somewhat unusual relationship she had growing up with her mother and its everlasting influence on who she is today.

Reviewed by Suzie 

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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.

About the Author: Arundhati Roy is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. She is the author of various works of non-fiction including My Seditious Heart, Azadi and, most recently, The Architecture of Modern Empire.

04 Sep 2025

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy ISBN 9780241761724