Mother Mary Comes To Me
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:4th Sep '25
£20.00
Available for immediate dispatch.
This hardback is available in other editions too:
- Paperback£11.99(9781405978477)
- Hardback - Signed Edition£20.00(9780241761717-S)
- Hardback£20.00(9780241761717-sXso)
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
Brave and absorbing . . . In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother . . . The world described in the first part of the book provides much of the material for The God of Small Things. But these pages aren’t significant for giving us access to Roy’s inspiration, or as a preamble to her life as a bestselling writer who would go on to become an oppositional political voice. Even if she were none of these things or had never written her novel, they would be utterly absorbing. They have a wonderful, self-assured self-sufficiency * Guardian *
Beautifully written . . . It is a total pleasure to spend time with Arundhati Roy’s mind and memory in this funny, wise, candid and perceptive memoir * Independent, 'Book of the Month' (5 stars) *
The book has the lyricism of Gabriel García Márquez, the political sweep of Barbara Kingsolver, and the antic family humour of David Sedaris * Financial Times *
The best piece of non-fiction she has ever written * The Telegraph *
Feels like the best kind of fiction * The Economist *
Arundhati Roy writes in characteristically dazzling prose . . . This memoir teems with irreverent humour and acerbic, often brilliant insights * Irish Independent *
Sharp, irreverent, wickedly funny . . . unsettling, bruising, often brutal, yet ultimately life-affirming * BBC News *
ISBN: 9780241761717
Dimensions: 234mm x 142mm x 34mm
Weight: 487g
384 pages