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.
The author unravels her deeply personal experiences of becoming the person and writer she is, shaped most profoundly by her complex bond with her extraordinary, singular mother, Mary Roy, whom she ran from at age eighteen. As she grappled with the intensity of her grief after her mother’s passing in September 2022, she turned to writing, offering readers an emotional journey filled with moments of anger, joy, heartbreak, longing, tenderness, and deep introspection.
The result is a memoir that is not only astonishing and unsettling but also unexpectedly sharp, funny, and extremely moving. It offers a vivid and unflinching portrait of love, loss, rebellion, and the powerful, enduring bonds that shape who we are.
Arundhati Roy says, ‘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, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist. Because that’s what novelists are—labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.’
Manasi Subramaniam, Editor-in-Chief and Vice President, Hamish Hamilton, Allen Lane, Viking, Penguin Classics, Penguin, Penguin Random House India, says, ‘Mother Mary comes to you, too: preorders for Arundhati Roy’s memoir open today—and with them, a door into a story long carried, long buried, a story that is unique and yet universal. 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 time has come for readers to now claim their place in this journey.’
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. As Arundhati Roy writes, ‘It made me realize how literature can join humans in a bond of quiet intimacy the way almost nothing else can,’ this work offers not just her personal story, but a profound reflection on the connective power of words.
A hardback priced at INR 899, Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy is currently on pre-order on the online platform.
