Mother Mary Comes to Me - by Arundhati Roy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Mother Mary Comes to Me draws on multiple strands of the author's early years, unveiling an empathetic and at the same time marvelously satirical portrait of an eccentric extended family with a fondness for spectacular family feuds. Roy's maternal lineage was saddled with a legacy of violence yet blessed with the gifts of education and English fluency. 'Mrs. Roy' formed the tempestuous foundation upon which Roy and her brother, 'LKC, ' raised themselves. A single mother who suffered from debilitating asthma and thunderous moods, Mary Roy founded a coeducational school--a revolutionary act in its time--and grew it into a spectacularly influential institution. The rage and unpredictability Mrs. Roy was known for was the secret to her success in a patriarchal society unaccustomed to seeing a woman soar to great heights while rejecting cultural roles designed to clip her wings"--

Book Synopsis

Named One of The New York Times Book Review's Top Ten Books of the Year

Winner of the 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.

In this, her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy writes, "Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject."

Mother Mary Comes to Me, is an intimate chronicle, "full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence" (The Washington Post), of the relationship between two women, a school teacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter. Roy writes with a novelist's unsettling ability to be inside her own story as well as outside it, simultaneously child and adult, attached and detached, protagonist and narrator. She describes how she came to be 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."

"Heart-smashed" by Mary's death, yet puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her."

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me "builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose" (The New Republic). An ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace--Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir like no other.

Review Quotes

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize in Non-Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Guardian, NPR, TIME Magazine, LitHub, The Economist, Elle Magazine, BookRiot, Mother Jones, BookPage, Booklist, Minnesota Star Tribune, Apple Books, Amazon, The Times (UK) and the Independent (UK)

"[Roy] channels warmth, moral clarity and a sweeping bird's-eye view of modern India to tell her life story, which was shaped by poverty, violence, political upheaval and--most of all--the volatile single mother who raised her."
--The New York Times

"Tender...full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence."
--The Washington Post

"An electrifying look at the author's career and activism."
--People Magazine

"This book pulses with compassion and moral outrage...Ms. Roy acknowledges that her difficult mother shaped the free-spirited, headstrong, risk-taking writer she became...It's clear from this memoir that while Ms. Roy has lost her chief adversary, she hasn't lost her fire."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Writers have the ability to tell stories that create the world we want to live in...With every book, every essay, every speech, Roy builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose."
--The New Republic

"The first memoir from Roy details her come-up as a writer, but it's as much a biography of her complicated, compelling single mother, Mary...fascinating."
--New York Magazine

"The book has the lyricism of Gabriel García Márquez, the political sweep of Barbara Kingsolver, and the antic family humor of David Sedaris."
--Financial Times

"The prizewinning novelist's unsparing memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Cinematic...dense with the lyrical language, deep empathy and fierce social critique that have made Roy's novels international bestsellers...a masterpiece of memoir writing, a rich tapestry of memory, reckoning and longing."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"In electrifying, intimate prose, Roy's first memoir traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary and how it shaped the person--and writer--she ultimately became."
--The Millions

"Roy turns inward to reflect on a complicated relationship with her late mother, herself an activist, whose barbed love of Roy and her brother could by turns sustain and devastate."
--NPR.org

"The first memoir from legendary novelist Arundhati Roy tackles her complicated, fascinating relationship with her mother and how it shaped almost every part of her life."
--Town & Country

"Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother...Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Praise for Arundhati Roy

"The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable."
--John Berger

"Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."
--Naomi Klein

"Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach."
--Noam Chomsky

"Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays."
--Howard Zinn

"Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time ... courageous, visionary, and erudite."
--Cornel West

"Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings."
--Wallace Shawn

"[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist. . . . So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons ... that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing."
--Booklist

"The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating."
--New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which has been translated into more than forty languages and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Roy has also published several works of nonfiction, including Azadi, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and Broken Republic. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024, the PEN Pinter Prize for telling "urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty." She lives in Delhi.