Scribner is delighted to announce the September 2025 publication of Mother Mary Comes to Me, a major new book by Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy.
Her first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all, by her complex relationship with her extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”
The memoir is scheduled for simultaneous publication by Scribner, Scribner Canada, Penguin Random House UK, and Penguin Random House India, with additional rights sold in eight territories to date, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands. Simon & Schuster Audio will publish a simultaneous audio edition to be read by Arundhati Roy.
“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022, puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Arundhati 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, often disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
“I have been writing this book all my life,” said Arundhati Roy. “Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject. It’s not easy for me to think of this story being out in this world, at this time, but I am reassured by the fact that it will be published by some of the most thoughtful, legendary publishers in the world.”
“I came away from reading Mother Mary Comes to Me thinking about Arundhati’s capaciousness,” said Kathy Belden, Vice President and Editorial Director of Scribner. “Her mind, her compassion, her love of home, of people, the way she seeks justice and equity. She carries so much, has room for so much. And in the way of all great art, by going on this journey with her, readers will be expanded, too, in their perspective and receptivity. This is why we read.”
“It is the greatest gift to publish Arundhati Roy, whose work is so exhilarating, humane, and vital,” said Nan Graham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Scribner. “This memoir gives us her astonishing witness and journey. We are thrilled that Nicole Winstanley and our Simon & Schuster Canada colleagues will also publish Mother Mary Comes to Me.”
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.
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 fifty languages and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017. Roy has also published several works of non-fiction, including Azadi, My Seditious Heart, The End of Imagination, and The Doctor and the Saint. 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.
Nan Graham and Kathy Belden acquired U.S. and audio rights from literary agent Lisette Verhagen of Peters Fraser & Dunlop and Anthony Arnove of Roam Agency. Foreign rights are being handled by Peters Fraser & Dunlop.
