Mother Mary Comes to Me

Named One of The New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography | Finalist for the Kirkus Prize | Nominated for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction

One of the best-reviewed books of the year, a raw and deeply moving memoir that “pulses with compassion and moral outrage” (The Wall Street Journal) from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that 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.

“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.