Mother Mary Comes to Me
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir by Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winning author of The God of Small Things and a longtime political essayist. Roy turns her attention to her own life, with particular focus on her mother Mary Roy, the Kerala educator and women's rights activist whose 1986 court victory secured equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in India. The memoir traces Roy's childhood in Kerala, her difficult relationship with a brilliant and demanding mother, her years drifting through architecture school and the Delhi film world, and the path that led to her first novel and later to her political writing on Kashmir, dams, and Indian democracy. Roy writes with the same close, unsparing attention she brings to fiction, treating her mother as both subject and shaping force on her own voice as a writer.
Also by Arundhati Roy
What you might want to know about Mother Mary Comes to Me
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Arundhati Roy's memoir of her complicated mother and the life that shaped her novels and activism.
No, but readers of The God of Small Things will recognize the Kerala setting and family textures.
Yes, alongside the family story it traces her path into political writing.
Mother Mary Comes to Me was written by Arundhati Roy, published in 2025 by Penguin Books, Limited.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Mother Mary Comes to Me takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
