There are some books that you know you can’t do justice to, no matter how eloquent your review.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is one such book.
This is Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy’s memoir, written in the time after her mother’s death.
I am generally a slow non-fiction reader, but with Mother Mary Comes to Me, I was pleasantly surprised.
Although I liked The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I find Roy’s non-fiction is where she hits her stride.
It often, reads more like fiction, than her actual fiction.
Mother Mary reads like a novel told in first person. A heartbreaking yet funny story of a woman, her mother, and her survival.
Several things about this book blew me away.
Firstly, the sheer amount that Roy has survived, basically by relying on her wits and instincts.
I didn’t know about her background and her life before The God of Small Things, so this story was a revelation.
I also knew very little about her mother. It sounds like Mary Roy was a force in her own right.
A brilliant complicated woman who both touched the lives of countless people, yet at the same time was capable of such cruelty and damage.
Within all this big emotional stuff, Roy effortlessly inserts moments of levity into the darkness.
One sentence may make you laugh, then the second sentence might break your heart. The humour, the language and the observations are on point.
It is a beautiful and relatively fast read, and gives you an inside glimpse into what made her the woman she is today.
It is a story (in both her life and her mother’s) of fearless women making it in a world designed for men.
Even if you don’t like memoirs or non-fiction in general, I would suggest you give this book a try. It is a beautiful story of hope, survival, and the very real costs of sticking to your principles in times like these.
I absolutely loved it. What a brilliant read to start 2026.
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