Arundhati Roy: Memoir out in August

“Heart-smashed” by her mother’s death, Roy began writing the memoir to process her grief and understand her complicated feelings toward the woman she left at 18, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her”.

American Kahani News Desk

         The memoir marks Roy's first foray into autobiographical writing, offering an intimate exploration of her complex relationship with her late mother.

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy will tour North America this September to promote her highly anticipated debut memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, publisher Simon & Schuster has announced. The book will be released around August 28, 2025.

        Mary Roy, her mother, died in September 2022. Roy describes her mother as both “my shelter and my storm” — a formidable woman who founded a school in Kerala, India, and profoundly shaped the author’s life and literary career.

“Heart-smashed” by her mother’s death, Roy began writing the memoir to process her grief and understand her complicated feelings toward the woman she left at 18, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.”

The memoir traces Roy’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, through her rise as an internationally acclaimed novelist and essayist. With the same sweeping scale as her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the book promises to be “an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace”.

The memoir has already garnered critical acclaim, earning a starred review from ‘Kirkus Reviews’, which praised it as “an intimate, stirring chronicle” that “revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.”

The book has been selected as a LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025, positioning it as one of the year’s most significant literary releases.

   Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, has established herself as both a literary powerhouse and a radical and conscientious political voice. Her novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 and translated into more than 40 languages.

         Recently, she received the European Essay Prize for lifetime achievement in 2023 and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2024 for telling “urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.”

             Apart from fiction, her published works include incisive essays and commentary on contemporary times, and are widely read across the world.  These incude:

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·         The Shape of the Beast. (A book of her interviews).

·         Listening to Grasshoppers.

·         An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire..

·         Broken Republic.

·         Azadi.

·         Book Tour Schedule

·         September 10 Howard Gilman Opera House30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217

·         September 12 Convocation Hall31 King’s College Cir, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1

·         September 17 Vancouver Playhouse Theatre600 Hamilton St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 5N6

·         September 18 Seattle Arts & Lectures at Meany Hall4040 George Washington Lane Northeast, Seattle, WA 98195

·         September 19 City Arts & Lectures at Goldstein Theater275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94117

·         September 20 Baldwin & Co.1030 Elysian Fields Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117

·         All events begin at 12:00 AM and will be held in person.

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Text and top photo: Courtesy American Kahani

https://americankahani.com/lead-stories/arundhati-roy-to-embark-on-6-city-north-american-book-tour-to-promote-her-memoir-mother-mary-comes-to-me/

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