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Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK, has acquire the rights to Mother Mary Comes to Me by 1997 Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, set for publication in September 2025. Hamish Hamilton publishing director Simon Prosser acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding India and Canada, from Lisette Verhagen at PFD, who are also handling foreign rights.
Her first work of memoir, this is a account of how Roy became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to her mother she describes as "my shelter and my storm".
Following her mother’s death in September 2022, Roy began to write, to try and make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age 18. The publisher describes the book as "astonishing, often disturbing and surprisingly funny memoir" of the author’s life from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.
Rights have been sold in twelve territories so far: Hamish Hamilton (UK), Scribner (US), Scribner Canada, Penguin Random House India, Fischer (Germany), Gallimard (France), Guanda (Italy), Alfaguara/PRH (Spain), Park Uitgevers (the Netherlands), Brombergs (Sweden), Otava (Finland) and Pax (Norway). The book will be published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton on 4th September 2025 in hardback, trade paperback, e-book and audio, and the audio edition will be read by Arundhati Roy.
Roy said: "I have been writing this book all my life. 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.
"It’s not easy for me to think of this story being out in this world, at this time, but I am reassured by the fact that it will be published by some of the most thoughtful, legendary publishers in the world."
Prosser said: "What an astonishing book this is—a triumph of a memoir, magically combining all the many elements of Arundhati Roy’s life and writing. Riveting, radiant and revelatory, it is also radically honest, frequently funny and deeply moving. Arundhati is a wonder and an inspiration—and so is this book."