Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography Nominated for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction Named One of The New York Times Book Review ’s Top Ten Books of the Year Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize 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. A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography 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