Arundhati Roy’s first memoir, ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me,’ to be published in September 2025

By Hillel Italie, The Associated Press on September 20, 2024.

FILE - Writer and activist Arundhati Roy participates in a protest at the press club of India in New Delhi, India on Oct. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri, File)

NEW YORK (AP) – Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy’s first memoir is coming out next fall, a book inspired by the death of her mother.

Scribner announced Friday that the Indian author and activist’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me” will be released in September 2025. Roy, best known for her Booker-winning novel “The God of Small Things,” said in a statement that she began working on the book after her mother’s death in September 2022. Mary Roy, whose life was fictionalized in “The God of Small Things,” was a renowned educator to whom her daughter dedicated the book and who was eulogized by the author as “one of the fiercest, most fabulous” people she ever knew.

“I have been writing this book all my life,” Arundhati Roy said in Friday’s statement. “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.”

Roy, 61, has also written the novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” and such nonfiction as “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” “Walking with the Comrades” and “Kashmir.” Scribner is calling Roy’s memoir an “astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny” book that traces her life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.”