Arundhati Roy will tell the story of her life in a new memoir.
Scribner will publish the Indian author’s Mother Mary Comes to Me next year, the press announced in a news release, calling the book “an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.”
Roy worked as a screenwriter before publishing her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997; the family epic won the Booker Prize. She wrote several nonfiction books, including The Cost of Living, Field Notes on Democracy, and Capitalism, before releasing her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, in 2017.
An outspoken political activist, Roy won the PEN Pinter Prize earlier this year. She is being prosecuted in India under an anti-terrorism law for comments she made in 2010 about the territory of Kashmir.
Roy’s memoir, Scribner says, will be “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 complex relationship with her extraordinary, singular mother she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm.’”
“I have been writing this book all my life,” Roy said in a statement. “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.”
Mother Mary Comes to Me is slated for publication next September.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
