Mother Mary Comes to Me

• THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
• 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 WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025
• LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2026

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.

2025 BOOK OF THE YEAR ACCORDING TO NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, TIME, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, OBSERVER