Penguin Random House India is delighted to announce the publication in September 2025 of Mother Mary Comes To Me, a major new book by Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy.
Her 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 complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.
‘Heart-smashed’ by her mother Mary’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 this astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
With the scale, sweep and depth of her novels, The God Of Small Things and The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity and warmth of her essays, this book is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace – a memoir like no other.
Commenting on the upcoming book, Arundhati Roy says, ‘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. It’s not easy for me to think of this story being out in this world, at this time, but I am reassured by the fact that it will be published by some of the most thoughtful, legendary publishers in the world.’
Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief of Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India says, ‘That Arundhati Roy has chosen this generous, courageous memoir as her means to unravel her relationship with her formidable mother is our privilege entirely—for, in doing so, she allows her reader to bear witness to a remarkable journey. Filled with heart and nerve, humour and pathos, and the very raw edges of love, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a visceral and unflinching account of personal and political awakening. We are delighted to share it with the world.’
In addition to India, the book will be published in the following territories- the UK (Hamish Hamilton), the US & Canada (Scribner), Germany (Fischer), France (Gallimard), Italy (Guanda), Spain (Alfaguara/PRH), the Netherlands (Park Uitgevers), Sweden (Bromberg), Finland (Otava) and Norway (Pax).