Arundhati Roy, the author of The God of Small Things, at Baldwin & Co.

Join us at Baldwin & Co. for an extraordinary evening with Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize–winning author of The God of Small Things, as she shares her raw, deeply personal new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.

In her first work of memoir, Roy explores the fierce, beautiful, and complicated bond with her mother, Mary Roy—an unflinching educator, activist, and force of nature who shaped Arundhati’s life as a woman, a writer, and a political thinker. From a rebellious childhood in Kerala to international literary acclaim, Roy's journey is told with the poetic intensity and fearless honesty that have defined her career.

This is more than a conversation about a book—it’s an intimate exploration of love, grief, memory, and liberation. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear from one of the most powerful literary voices of our time as she reflects on identity, artistry, and the indelible mark of a mother’s presence.

Reviews

A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

"Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother...Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love. An intimate, stirring chronicle."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Praise for Arundhati Roy

"The world has never had to face such global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to and listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable."
—John Berger

"Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."
—Naomi Klein

"Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach."
—Noam Chomsky

"Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays."
—Howard Zinn

"Arundhati Roy is one of the few great revolutionary intellectuals in our time … courageous, visionary, and erudite."
—Cornel West

"Her incomparable divining rod picks up the cries of the despised and the oppressed in the most remote corners of the globe; it even picks up the cries of rivers and fish. With an unfailing charm and wit that makes her writing constantly enlivening to read, her analysis of our grotesque world is savagely clear, and yet her anger never obscures her awareness that beauty, joy, and pleasure can potentially be part of the life of human beings."
—Wallace Shawn

"[Roy is] an electrifying political essayist. . . . So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons … that her essays are as uplifting as they are galvanizing."
—Booklist

"The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating."
—New York Times Book Review

✨ Event Highlights:

• Author talk & reading with Arundhati Roy
• Discussion on love, loss, and the making of a writer
• Audience Q&A
• Book signing & photo opportunity
• A moving night of storytelling and reflection

Be part of an unforgettable evening that honors the storm and the shelter that shape us.

Also check out other Arts events in New Orleans, Literary Art events in New Orleans.