Deliverance from a troubled family history lies at the core of Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me, an origin story fueled by the Indian author's ferocious wit and the masterful storytelling that is her trademark. Now a globally acclaimed literary phenomenon, Roy (The God of Small Things) charts her path from the tea estates of Assam and a tiny village in Kerala to big-city life in Delhi via the beaches of Goa. The one figure who remains present on every page, in person or in spirit, is Roy's larger-than-life late mother, the formidable Mary Roy. Roy admiringly describes her mother as having "the edginess of a gangster." Mrs. Roy famously petitioned the Supreme Court in Delhi to repeal the Christian Succession Act that limited a woman's inheritance rights, winning an equal share in her father's ancestral property.
With staggering clarity and self-awareness, Mother Mary Comes to Me excavates the deeper truths behind a fraught yet liberating bond with a mother who instinctively understood that Roy "has a writer's heart." This elegant book memorializes the maternal courage and devotion that was Mrs. Roy's final bequest. --Shahina Piyarali