MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME- BOOKER PRIZE WINNER, ARUNDHATI ROY’S MEMOIR

National, June, 2025: Penguin Random House India is delighted to announce the pre-order of Mother Mary Comes To Me, a major new book by Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy. It will be available in bookstores and on online platforms across India from 2nd September 2025 onwards.

Arundhati Roy’s forthcoming memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, is an evocative, courageous, and deeply moving exploration of identity, grief, memory, and the transformative power of writing. At its heart lies the author’s deeply personal and often tumultuous relationship with her mother, Mary Roy—an extraordinary woman whose presence loomed large in her life, both as a source of fierce inspiration and profound emotional complexity. This is a memoir of becoming: of growing into the woman and writer Arundhati Roy is today, shaped and sometimes shadowed by the indelible mark her mother left on her.

Mary Roy was no ordinary parent. A pioneering educator, a fearless fighter for women’s rights, and a woman of formidable strength, Mary was as brilliant and singular as she was unpredictable and exacting. Roy ran away from home at the age of eighteen, a decision that marked the beginning of her lifelong reckoning with her mother’s influence. The story she tells is not a straightforward tale of estrangement and reconciliation—it is far more layered, shifting through moments of resentment, awe, love, and longing. In the aftermath of Mary Roy’s passing in September 2022, Roy found herself in the throes of grief and turned instinctively to writing. The result is not just a personal tribute, but a vivid emotional journey filled with rage, joy, heartbreak, tenderness, and profound introspection.

This memoir offers an unflinching look at the mother-daughter relationship, one that many readers may find strikingly resonant. It doesn’t seek to idealize or vilify—it seeks to understand. Roy brings to this act of remembering the same sharp intelligence, poetic sensibility, and uncompromising honesty that have defined her novels and essays. The result is a narrative that is astonishing and unsettling, but also unexpectedly funny, insightful, and full of warmth. It is a literary act of both rebellion and reverence.

As Roy writes, “In my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her perspective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze…” This metaphor of the labyrinth is one of the memoir’s most haunting and beautiful images. Roy paints herself as a living network of memories, emotions, and contradictions—formed, in large part, by the need to make sense of her mother’s intricate persona. The writing becomes a way to navigate that maze, a way to access a vantage point beyond her own limited view. In doing so, she uncovers a deeper appreciation for Mary Roy—not just as a mother, but as a woman shaped by her own battles, victories, and losses.

Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at Penguin Random House India, captures the essence of this book when she writes, “At the centre of this fierce, intimate act of remembering are two women, a schoolteacher and a writer, who happen to be mother and daughter.” The memoir is as much about Arundhati Roy as it is about Mary Roy. It becomes a shared story, one that echoes across generations, and invites readers to reflect on their own familial bonds—the ways we inherit, resist, and ultimately embrace those who raise us.

In the tradition of her best-known works—The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness—Roy brings to this memoir the same grandeur of scope, depth of emotion, and fearless political insight. But Mother Mary Comes To Me also carries an intimacy and vulnerability that is strikingly new. It is a book that celebrates freedom—the freedom to tell one’s story, to remember with honesty, to grieve without shame, and to write without constraint.

Roy writes, “It made me realize how literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can.” That bond is the memoir’s true gift to its readers. It is not just an account of a life lived alongside a formidable mother, but a meditation on how storytelling itself becomes a lifeline—connecting past to present, self to other, and grief to grace.

Currently available for pre-order, Mother Mary Comes To Me promises to be a literary event—an unforgettable testament to the complexity of love and the power of language to hold it all.

Book Title: Mother Mary Comes To Me
Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Available: Amazon

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