Cover to Cover

The books we read and loved in the year gone by

- 

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy has the gift of language. And a life filled with challenges that make it fit for great literature. But it could have all come undone given the girlhood trauma she bore all through her womanhood. Call it luck or blame it on the mysterious workings of the universe, Roy, who could have become a social misfit instead became an internationally acclaimed writer and a feisty woman of worthy causes who does not buckle down under the pressure of Big Politics or Big Business. Her latest offering Mother Mary Comes To Me, thus, is both memoir and a self-help book for anyone wanting to live life on her own terms.

The book is also an ode to her mother, Mary Roy, an educator par excellence, an advocate for women's rights and also a mother whose tough love made her children want to escape home. The book is in equal parts about Arundhati Roy's adventures through life as an architect-turned-writer-activist and her quest to make peace with her mother. Roy, who has spent a life pulling no punches to write against the Big and the Powerful, has now turned her critical gaze on the Indian family. A must-read for all those who do not agree with her otherwise.

-Himani Kothari

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times." This line from the book is something I felt occasionally. I am sure it's the same for many others who have lost their loved ones. I feel it when I eat something I am sure my grandfather loved to eat or watch a clip or hear a song from Rab Ne Banadi Jodi or Jab We Met (his favourite films) or when I fall sick and he isn’t around to suggest medicines—to me or anyone he knew was sick—as he has done all my life.