Arundhati Roy’s first memoir, ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me,’ to be published in September 2025

NEW YORK (AP) — Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy’s first memoir is coming out next fall, a book inspired by the death of her mother.

Scribner announced Friday that the Indian author and activist’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me” will be released in September 2025. Roy, best known for her Booker-winning novel “The God of Small Things,” said in a statement that she began working on the book after her mother’s death in September 2022. Mary Roy, whose life was fictionalized in “The God of Small Things,” was a renowned educator to whom her daughter dedicated the book and who was eulogized by the author as “one of the fiercest, most fabulous” people she ever knew.

“I have been writing this book all my life,” Arundhati Roy said in Friday’s 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.”

Roy, 61, has also written the novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” and such nonfiction as “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” “Walking with the Comrades” and “The Doctor and the Saint.” Scribner is calling Roy’s memoir an “astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny” book that traces her life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.”