Mother Mary Comes To Me

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

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SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
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 THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2026
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2026

Arundhati Roy is the author of a number of books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages. She was born in 1959 in Shillong, India, and studied architecture in Delhi, where she now lives. She has also written several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy, Walking with the Comrades, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, The End of Imagination, and most recently Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, co-authored with John Cusack. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize, the 2011 Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing, and the 2015 Ambedkar Sudar award.