“Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy

In her first work of memoir, acclaimed author Arundhati Roy recounts her remarkable life, tracing in particular her complicated relationship to her mother Mary. Vulnerable, compassionate, and sagacious at once, the LARB Book Club Fall 2025 pick is “Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy.

July 16, 2025

LARB Book Club is thrilled to announce our Fall 2025 Book Club title: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy! To join the LARB Book Club, where we put you in conversation with staff and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a Friend member today. This discussion will take place on October 29, 2025, at 6 p.m. PT on Zoom. Register for the discussion here.

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A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Mother Mary Comes to Me traces the author's complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and as a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the writer and the person 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 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, 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, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, through the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, to today.

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, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.

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“Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach.”—Noam Chomsky

“Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein

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Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which has been translated into more than forty languages and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Roy has also published several works of nonfiction including The End of Imagination, The Doctor and the Saint, My Seditious Heart, and Azadi. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement, and in 2024 the PEN Pinter Prize for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.” She lives in Delhi.

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Join our Book Club today to get Mother Mary Comes to Me plus our next three staff-curated selections, as well as access to our quarterly discussions hosted by LARB staff. Previous selections have included Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo, Audition by Katie Kitamura, and Lazarus Man by Richard Price.