Arundhati Roy.
Credit: Facebook/@ArundhatiRoyAuthor
New Delhi: Booker-winning writer Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, will hit the stands in September next year, publisher Penguin Random House announced on Friday.
The book is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person she is, shaped by circumstance, but, above all, by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm".
Her latest writing is borne out of her response to the death of her mother and women's rights activist Mary Roy in September 2022.
"I have been writing this book all my life. 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," Roy said in a statement.
Roy, who was puzzled and "more than a little ashamed" by the intensity of her response to her mother's death, wrote this book to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18, "not because I didn't love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her".
The author is known for her award-winning novels like The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the political clarity of her essays compiled in The End of Imagination, The Doctor and The Saint, and The Algebra of Infinite Justice.
"That Arundhati Roy has chosen this generous, courageous memoir as her means to unravel her relationship with her formidable mother is our privilege entirely—for, in doing so, she allows her reader to bear witness to a remarkable journey. Filled with heart and nerve, humour and pathos, and the very raw edges of love, Mother Mary Comes to Me is a visceral and unflinching account of personal and political awakening. We are delighted to share it with the world," Manasi Subramaniam, editor-in-chief of Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India said.
The book will be simultaneously published in the UK (Hamish Hamilton), the US & Canada (Scribner), Germany (Fischer), France (Gallimard), Italy (Guanda), Spain (Alfaguara/PRH), the Netherlands (Park Uitgevers), Sweden (Bromberg), Finland (Otava) and Norway (Pax).