Author: Roy, Arundhati

Memoirs

Published on 4 September 2025 by Penguin Books Ltd (Hamish Hamilton Ltd) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 384 pages
146 x 223 x 36 | 480g

The incredible first memoir from the Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small ThingsTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERFOYLES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025AUDIBLE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025BLACKWELL’S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025WINNER OF THE GOOGLE PLAY BEST OF 2025 AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2026SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMENS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2026Arundhati 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 chronicleunique 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 gracea memoir like no other.

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