Mother Mary Comes To Me
The Sunday Times bestselling memoir from the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- 189,00 kr
Publisher Description
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
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker Prize–winning novelist Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) delivers a bracing memoir that traces her thorny relationship with her mother, teacher and social activist Mary Roy. The author was "heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 2022, despite Mary's sometimes "soul-crushing meanness." In the aftermath, Roy was moved to examine the forces that made Mary tick. With characteristically elegant prose ("My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was a school. There was never any doubt about who our mother's favorite child was"), Roy balances an account of Mary's impressive résumé as an educator and advocate for women's property rights with a portrait of her emotional volatility. Raising Roy and her brother as a single mother in northeastern India, Mary was often cold and verbally abusive, insisting her children call her "Mrs. Roy." Severely asthmatic, constantly aware of her own mortality, and sometimes openly resentful of motherhood, Mary makes for an endlessly fascinating subject. Neither too bleak nor overly conciliatory, the account does justice to often-irresolvable feelings of familial ambivalence. It's a welcome addition to the shelf of memoirs about difficult moms.
