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Arundhati Roy, author of Mother Mary Comes to Me

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME is a soaring account of how Arundhati Roy became the person and the writer she is. “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, 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.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prize-winning novels and essays, through today.

Week of September 14, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of September 14th include Kristin Hannah's #1 New York Times bestseller, THE WOMEN, which is at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided; KING SORROW by Joe Hill, a chilling novel that finds six friends dabbling in the occult and are tragically, horrifyingly successful…calling forth an evil entity that demands regular human sacrifice; LIFE AND ART, a marvelous essay collection in which Richard Russo explains how the twin subjects of life and art inform each other and how the stories we tell shape our understanding of the world around us; and MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME, a memoir like no other that traces Arundhati Roy's complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life as both a woman and a writer.