Booker-winning radical icon Arundhati Roy’s incredible first memoir is a soaring account, both intimate and inspiring, of how 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”.

Distraught and even a “little ashamed” at the intensity of her response to the death of the mother she ran from at age eighteen. Arundhati began to write Mother Mary Comes to Me. The result is this astonishing, disconcerting, funny chronicle  which is unique and simultaneously universal, of the author’s life, from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace- a mother like no other.  Her novels have the passion, the political clarity, and warmth.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, Penguin , £18.40, 224 pages.