Book of the Week: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to Mary Roy, the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm”. "Heart-smashed" by her mother's death in 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 eighteen, "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, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and political essays, through today.

• What to make of the mother who made you.

• A fugitive childhood.

• All of us, everywhere.

• “I didn’t want my mother to destroy me, but I didn’t want to destroy her either.”

• Roy reads.

• The mother of big things.

• Perpetually at war with her children.

• From rebel roots to global voice.

• You mustn’t pretend you didn’t know.

• Books by Arundhati Roy.