WHAT TO READ NEW
"Mother Mary Comes to Me" by Arundhati Roy
“I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter”. So writes Roy in the opening chapter of this enthralling memoir which has all the sweep and verve of her prize-winning fiction (and don’t you just love the cover photo?). At heart, it’s an intimate account of how she became the person and the writer she is, but its magnetic poles belong to her mother, Mary Roy with whom she had a complex relationship, but who, the author tells us, was also ‘my shelter and my storm’.
While the writing of this totally distinctive book followed the onrush of memories and feelings provoked by her mother’s death, to characterise it as a grief memoir would be to typecast a book which renders so beautifully the ‘knotted feelings’ that often make our closest relationships the most challenging at the same time. It blazes with a fierce daughterly independence but also a daughterly love for an often difficult, but also extraordinary and singular mother who until the day she died “never stopped learning, never stagnated, never feared change, never lost her curiosity”. It’s an epitaph many of us would covet.
One of my favourite memoirs of autumn 2025.
Published by Hamish Hamilton, 4 September 2025