Mother Mary Comes To Me

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Brought to you by Penguin.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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.

'Brave and absorbing' Guardian

'Beautifully written...It's 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)

'The best piece of non-fiction she has ever written' The Telegraph

© Arundhati Roy 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

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
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)
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
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
Observer, 'The best books of 2025'
Feels like the best kind of fiction
The Economist
Arundhati Roy writes in characteristically dazzling prose . . . This memoir teems with irreverent humour and acerbic, often brilliant insights
Irish Independent
Sharp, irreverent, wickedly funny . . . unsettling, bruising, often brutal, yet ultimately life-affirming
BBC News
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
Observer
Arundhati Roy is just an electrifying writer, whatever she’s saying; Mother Mary Comes To Me is a kind of origin myth for her and her books, and a subtle treatment of a very complex parent
The Shift with Sam Baker, 'Books of the year 2025'

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