✨ AUTHOR SIGNED COPY ✨
A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — in a limited edition personally signed by Arundhati Roy.
Arundhati Roy's first work of memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is — shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm."
"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 eighteen — "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 Arundhati Roy's life — from her childhood in Kerala, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through to the present day.
With the scale, sweep and depth of her novels, and the passion, political clarity and warmth of her essays, this book is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace. A memoir like no other.
Praise
"Pulses with compassion and moral outrage." — The Wall Street Journal
"Full of precise imagery and blistering emotional intelligence." — The Washington Post
"Builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose." — The New Republic
Awards & Honours
- One of The New York Times Book Review's Top Ten Books of the Year
- Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
- Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
- Nominated for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction
