‘Heart-smashed’ by the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen and shaken by the intensity of her response, Arundhati Roy began this remarkable memoir – a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how the author became the person and the writer she is: shaped by circumstance, but above all by her relationship to her extraordinary, singular mother, Mary, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.

With the scale, sweep and depth of her novels, and the passion, political clarity and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace – a memoir like no other.