Searing honesty: ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ by Arundhati Roy
Have you ever found yourself in the inexplicable situation where, despite your love of one book from an author, you realise that you have not read anything else by them?
This happened to me recently. Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is on the list of titles to be discussed this year by my book group. I was pleased to see it there, as her debut and award-winning novel The God of Small Things is on my list of all-time favourite books.
Yet I realised that I had not read any of her subsequent works.Why not?
I absolutely could not say.
Perhaps just time, and the clamour for my reading attention by so many other titles.I also realised that I knew very little about this author, other than she was born and lives in India, that her debut was based, in part, on some of her childhood experiences, and that she has been an activist for many years.
From the opening pages of Mother Mary (which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction) I could see that this was going to be a searingly honest account of her life, from childhood, through formative experiences of young adulthood, taking in her writing career but also the adventures and escapades of her activism on environmental and human rights issues.
A main theme is the troubled, eccentric relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, whose life trajectory was anything but settled and ordinary. Mary was a fiery warrior for women’s rights in an India divided by religion, caste, gender and political beliefs. A single mother of two young children, Mary established a small private school to make a living for her family, but also to put into practice her beliefs about how children should be educated.
She also challenged unfair laws in the courts, battles which lasted decades.
Mary was beloved and feared in equal measure by her children, her employees, colleagues and the children she taught. She was cantankerous, eccentric, unpredictable, and sometimes cruel.
All this her daughter describes, including how her mother’s behaviour led to her decision to leave home forever at an early age, but also when Mary died, how she felt …wrecked, heart-smashed. I am puzzled and more than a little ashamed by the intensity of my response. (ebook loc 2 of 374)
I had never known that beloved landscape, never imagined it, never evoked it, without her being part of it…She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself. (ebook loc 1 of 374)
We are then immersed in the various, often precarious, situations that Arundhati encountered after leaving home; the people who impacted on her teenage and adult life; the path that led, eventually, to her writing The God of Small Things; the reaction of the literary world and her fellow Indians to the Booker Prize win, and what she did after.
As always, I was fascinated by the ‘back story’ of her first novel. It always intruiges me, how a spark of an idea, a memory or image, sound or smell, can be fanned by an artist into the flames that eventually become a finished novel, poem, song or painting.
Once I had finished Mother Mary Comes to Me, I realised that this book is several stories in one. It is the story of the lives that, through accident of birth or choice, were a family. It’s also the story of a nation as it struggles with the journey from colonial possession to independence, from tradition to modernity and everything in between.
Mother Mary Comes to Me was published by Penguin Books in 2025.
New review series: Library Treasures
What book lover doesn’t also love a library?
Our public libraries are places of connection and learning and offer the precious gift of books at minimal or no cost to the reader.And there is so much to adore about the newer phenomenon of street libraries: sharing, reciprocity and sustainability embodied in a humble cupboard or shelf outside someone’s home, for any and all to borrow from and contribute to.
I use and love both forms of libraries, so I thought it about time that I occasionally write about the treasures I find there.
These will usually be older books rather than new releases – though who knows what I’ll find at my local libraries or street cupboards?
Perhaps someone will be prompted to seek out a book at their local library if it sounds like their cup of tea.
First book off the shelf:
‘The Body: A Guide for Occupants’ by Bill Bryson
I enjoy Bryson’s writing, his quirky dry humour influenced by his birthplace, America, and also Britain where he spent many of his adult years. His travel writing is especially funny and insightful, though in more recent times he has expanded out into many other areas of non-fiction: history and science writing, for example. The Body is a bit of a blend of both.
It’s a big volume: 386 pages, not including notes and index. Bryson’s writing style is engaging, so even for someone like me (generally very much not a reader of science-related topics) it doesn’t feel like a slog.
It’s divided into chapters that traverse the main components of the human body, from our hearts and brains, skeletons, all the chemical wizardry that keeps us ticking along, what and how we eat, speak, see and hear…you get the idea.
The book is also chock full of amazing tidbits that kept me gasping: I didn’t know that!
Turns out there is so much about this body we inhabit from birth to death, that most of us are completely in the dark about.
Just a few examples:
- We all have more than a metre of DNA packed into every cell, and so many cells that put into a single strand, they would stretch ten billion miles to beyond Pluto. Enough to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic. p5
- Studies have shown the astounding (and to be honest, rather shocking) ways in which viruses and bacteria can spread from one human to another. One US study showed that a pretend virus spread from a door handle to an entire office building in just four hours, turning up on virtually every surface. p36
Wash your hands, people! - Motion sickness causes nausea because the body thinks it is being poisoned. p88
As a lifelong travel sickness sufferer, I’m not sure that is reassuring, but still interesting. - Our sense of smell is unbelievably complex, involving huge numbers of chemical compounds and various processes in our brains as well as our noses. p90
- Our kidneys produce a bathtub’s worth of water and salt every day. p155
Don’t forget to hydrate!
And many, many more jaw-dropping, humourous or simply wondrous facts…
Along the way are fascinating stories of how many of these facts were discovered, the personalities (dedicated, obsessive, or sometimes downright weird) of researchers who uncovered them. Some of these made me very glad to be alive now, not in medieaval times or even a century ago.
The final chapter is, of course, about the process of dying, and illustrates how much we still don’t know abut this normal, common, necessary but mysterious process.
All in all, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is an engrossing read, an absolute library treasure.
I’m grateful to my wonderful book group because the reason I borrowed it from my local library is that it is the first book set for our group for 2026. I might not have picked it up, otherwise, but I am very glad I did.The Body: A Guide for Occupants was published by Doubleday (an imprint of Penguin Books) in 2019.
Library photos by Sean Ingram and Rafael Cosquiere at pexels.
Unrecorded lives: ‘Tell Me Everything’ by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is a genius at the small moments. The lift of an arm, the turn of a head, a hand on a shoulder. A fallen blossom. Slushy snow on a sidewalk, wet shoes. A blush, a smile. Speaking, listening, being truly heard.
The small moments that build to make a friendship, a relationship, a marriage, a family. A life.
Tell Me Everything features characters from previous Strout novels such as Olive Ketteridge, Oh William! Lucy By the Sea. It is now post-Covid (or not quite, because Covid doesn’t seem to really go away, does it?) and Lucy and William have remained in their Maine house near the sea. Lucy’s friendship with local lawyer Bob Burgess has developed and deepened; they take regular long walks together where they talk – and really listen – to each other.
And who – who who who in this whole entire world – does not want to be heard?
Tell Me Everything p198Meanwhile Bob has taken on the defence of a local man accused of the murder of his mother. It’s a complicated case with many layers of hurt and history to uncover and understand.
Around Bob and Lucy, are other layers of hurt and misunderstanding as various members of their families struggle with illness, accidents, separation, grief and loss.
How each person deals with these inevitable setbacks are what makes up this novel’s dramatic sweep. Nothing out of the ordinary: they are the kinds of stumbling blocks to be found on the paths of most of us at some point or another, unless we blessed with a totally charmed life.
Another thread throughout are the visits Lucy pays to ninety year old Olive Kitteridge, during which they tell each other stories about people they have known – ‘unrecorded lives’. Some of the stories are almost unbearably painful, others shocking, a few mundane. But in their telling, the lives described are given meaning. And is that not what most of us seek in our lives – a meaning to the living of them?
So, in one sense Tell Me Everything is a novel where nothing in particular happens. In another, it’s a book where a great deal is happening a great deal of the time.
Tell Me Everything is a beautiful, gentle, heartfelt book. If you haven’t read the earlier books by this author, I would recommend you at least read Lucy by the Sea first, as it will help to place Lucy and William, Bob and Margaret, into the Maine town where this novel mainly takes place. Actually, do yourself a big favour and read all the books in this collection about Lucy, William, Bob and so on. Elizabeth Strout’s writing really is a masterclass in ‘less is more’, in subtlety and in using everyday language and keen observation to great effect.
Tell Me Everything was published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, in 2024.
A jolly Christmas…murder! ‘Everyone this Christmas has a secret’ by Benjamin Stevenson
I so thoroughly enjoyed Benjamin Stevenson’s first two mystery novels featuring Ernest Cunningham that I leapt at the chance to review this one, in time for Christmas.
In keeping with the catchy naming pattern of the first two books: Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect, readers are advised straight up that everyone in this new story should likewise be regarded as a suspect.
Ernest is an amateur detective who writes ‘how to write detective’ books – which is sort of funny in itself when you think about it. Stevenson is a comedian as well as an author, so the comedy is a big part of these novels along with the mystery. Ernest’s schtick is that he writes rules for what he calls ‘fair play mysteries’: like those written in what is sometimes called the golden age of crime fiction.
I loved two things about this one, on top of the main character – Ern is endearing and doesn’t take himself too seriously, though he is very serious about solving the crimes that he inevitably stumbles upon in the novels.
Firstly, the Christmas theme. The motif of a Christmas advent calendar is used so cleverly throughout, each chapter giving a clue as a new window on the calendar opens. It’s done so well, blending the narrative of the crime and the various characters’ motives and movements, with the Christmas setting.
Secondly, the novel is set in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, just up the road from where I live. The second crime novel set in the Blue Mountains I have read this year! While I would not want people to think that my little part of the world is more prone to murder than any other, it is a beautiful and evocative setting for a novel and I am pleased to see it getting its share of the limelight.
If you haven’t yet met Ernest and his family, I would heartily recommend beginning with the first two of Stevenson’s books and then reading this one. The audio versions are also excellent. They are light-hearted reads, while keeping you thinking as the complexities of the twisty plots are revealed. And give plenty of chuckles along the way.
Everyone this Christmas has a Secret is published by Penguin Books Australia in October 2024.
My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for a review copy.
‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yoval Noah Harari
While we homo sapiens might feel pleased to be the species that has seemingly evolved to ‘rule the world’, this book should give pause for thought.
It’s a sweeping story of our history: how we evolved and separated from other human species such as the Neanderthals, why we have paid a price for the development of our relatively large brains, how the ‘cognitive revolution’ distinguished our species from other animals (and what we have done with this advantage since), how and why myths such as gods, race, nationalities, money and human rights were created.
There are some ideas that I am certain would be controversial to some, including:
- the ‘agricultural revolution’ actually resulted in humankind spending more time and effort feeding itself than in hunter-gatherer communities
- it is possible that, far from grains such as wheat or rice being ‘domesticated’ by humans, it could be the other way around: that these grains trained humans to spend huge amounts of labour tending them, allowing them to become masters of the grain world.
- the three unifying forces of humankind have been money, empire and religion, and of these:
- capitalism is the most successful religion invented by humans, requiring high levels of trust to operate effectively.
Sapiens is definitely a thought-provoking book. Always interested in the ‘back story’ in how things came to be as they are, I found the historic elements deeply fascinating.
The last section of the book ventures into territory which for me was far less comfortable, involving scary questions about the future of humankind, as technological developments seemingly outpace our collective ability to predict where they might lead or to place conditions on their use.
First published in 2015, the questions in this book are now more relevant than ever, surrounded as we are by the growth of cyborg, genetic and other technologies which could conceivably lead to the end of homo sapien and even devolution into a new species.
More questions than answers; but perhaps a book of this nature needs to raise issues that can’t be easily addressed. If the idea is to make readers sit up and take notice, to think more deeply about the rapid pace of change, and to appreciate our collective past as a species, Sapiens achieves this very well indeed.
Books like this should be read by scientists, ethicists, teachers, medical professionals and legislators, because these are the people holding the reins of our collective future.
Sapiens was published by Vintage (an imprint of Penguin Books.)
I listened to the audiobook version, also released in 2015 and read in English by Derek Perkins.
