Arundhati’s first memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me, to be published by Penguin India in September 2025, is the author’s intimate account of how she became the person and the writer she is. Shaped by circumstance and, more importantly, her complex relationship with the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm”.
“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary Roy’s death in September 2022, puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Arundhati Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”
And so begins a memoir about the author’s life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi. Commenting on the upcoming book, Roy said, “I have been writing this book all my life. Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”
In addition to India, the book will also be published in the UK (Hamish Hamilton), the US and Canada (Scribner), Germany (Fischer), France (Gallimard), Italy (Guanda), Spain (Alfaguara/PRH), the Netherlands (Park Uitgevers), Sweden (Bromberg), Finland (Otava), and Norway (Pax).
