Compilation of book covers. (Images: Bantam Books / Ballantine Books / Kwela / Scribner) Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is, on the surface, a memoir about Roy’s relationship with her mother, Mary. But it refuses to stay contained within that frame.
The book threads Roy’s own life story through Mary’s, until it becomes impossible to separate the two. At its core is a portrait of a woman who is at once formative, formidable and devastating. Mary is, in many ways, extraordinary. A single mother who defies social expectations, she builds a school that grows into something far beyond an educational institution.
It becomes a refuge, expanding to house children who have nowhere else to go. Roy describes it as both a kind of cult and a space of radical possibility, where girls are taught to imagine lives larger than those prescribed to them. It is Mary who teaches Roy to speak, to think, to reach.
But the same woman who opens worlds for her daughter also closes them. Mary is shockingly cruel. She calls her six-year-old son a chauvinist pig, tells him he is ugly, stupid, that he should kill himself. She uses illness as a tool of control. She mimics Roy’s voice, undercuts her, diminishes her. The emotional and psychological violence is so relentless that Roy and her brother are eventually forced to flee the school that is also their home.
What makes the memoir so unsettling is its refusal to flatten Mary into a villain. She is also a victim of sexual and physical violence, and Roy is unflinching in tracing how trauma travels across generations, reshaping itself unless it is consciously confronted.
This is not a story of neat redemption. It is a study of contradiction. In Roy’s telling, childhood can be both brutal and happy. Love and harm coexist without cancelling each other out. Mary’s public life mirrors these contradictions. She becomes a feminist icon, challenging discriminatory inheritance laws and winning a landmark case in the Supreme Court that secures equal land rights for women in Kerala.
This is a deeply intimate book, but it is also unmistakably Roy. Ideas are never simplified. Nothing is resolved too easily. The memoir offers insight into her formation as a writer and the emergence of her political consciousness, grounding her public voice in a complex private history.
What lingers is not just the story itself, but the way Roy invites us to sit with discomfort, to hold multiple truths at once, and to think more carefully about the worlds we inherit and the ones we choose to make.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy was published in September 2025. Retail price: about R445.
Esther Is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney
I read this book on a flight abroad. It is an easy but gripping read. At its centre is a story about stalking and the strange logic of obsession in the age of digital presence. In a world where it is relatively easy to follow someone’s every move, pictures posted online become clues. From them you can piece together where someone spends time, who their friends are, and what their life looks like from the outside.
Esther has been married to John for a couple of years. She has moved from Ireland to the UK and, by all appearances, they have a good life together. They function as a unit. Things are steady, comfortable. Then, while out walking one day, Esther runs into Ted, a mid-level celebrity. They do not speak. In fact, Ted barely acknowledges her. Yet Esther convinces herself that the moment mattered.
She piles meaning onto an encounter that, in reality, contains none. From there the obsession begins. Esther joins an online fan group called the “Tedettes”, where members trade and track the small trivia of Ted’s day-to-day life. At first she simply watches along with them. But soon that is not enough.
Ted lives in Canada, and on a whim Esther cashes in her savings and decides to move there. She is utterly convinced that if she meets him in person he will recognise the logic of loving her, leave his girlfriend and choose a life with her. So she goes. Esther finds a place to stay close to where Ted lives and begins to orbit his world.
Parts of the plot stretch plausibility, but the novel largely gets away with it because the reader is drawn so deeply into the escalating madness of her obsession. Esther is clearly grappling with mental health struggles, yet the choices she makes in pursuit of Ted are also strikingly cruel.
She leaves her husband without explanation and disappears for more than 10 months, refusing to respond to any of his messages. Responsibility simply evaporates. That recklessness fuels the story’s intensity and adds a layer of shock to the narrative.
In a world shaped by digital surveillance and curated online lives, the book touches on serious themes while remaining a light, fast-moving read with moments that are genuinely funny.
I found myself deeply invested in Esther’s story, sometimes wanting to reach into the pages and yank her by the hair. Girl, get a grip. And that is exactly what makes the novel so compelling.
Esther Is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney was published in January 2026. Retail price: about R395.
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy
There is a moment, not far into Half His Age, when you have to decide what kind of book you are reading. The premise is uncomfortable: sixteen-year-old Waldo falls for her creative writing teacher, Mr Korgy. He falls back.
For a while, McCurdy withholds the terms of that exchange. The story could tilt towards moral clarity or moral confusion, and she lets it hover there, unresolved. But she is not uncertain. That becomes clear.
The knowledge that McCurdy herself had a relationship with an older man at eighteen lends the book a particular authority. Not permission, but proximity.
What she does with the relationship between Waldo and Mr Korgy is precise and unflinching. She tracks how Waldo begins to feel, how desire takes shape in the body before it has language. The pursuit. His quiet awe at being chosen by someone so young, and what that awe reveals about him.
There is a great deal of sex in the novel, and it can be difficult to read, the age difference sitting heavily in these scenes and exposing just how uneven the relationship is. Then there’s the secrecy: the skulking, the hidden meeting places, the groping in in-between spaces. McCurdy refuses to make it beautiful, even when Waldo does.
The book’s most devastating moments sit at the edges of the affair rather than at its centre. Waldo stalking Mr Korgy on his birthday. The slow realisation that she is being fitted into the margins of his life, that her feelings expand while his are rationed.
When she tells him she loves him, believing that naming it might alter the shape of things, he cannot say it back. The imbalance settles into place. McCurdy is careful about the conditions that make this story possible. The neglectful mother. The loneliness. The particular hunger of a girl who has never been properly held.
This is not a story about a precocious teenager who seduces a hapless man. It is a story about power. About a man who understands exactly what he is doing and proceeds anyway. McCurdy makes sure we see this, even when Waldo cannot.
Half His Age does not look away. Not from the desire, not from the damage, not from the structure that holds it in place.
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy was published in January 2026. Retail price: about R385.
Haram by Zubayr Charles
Haram by Zubayr Charles introduces a fresh voice into the literary space, one that feels rooted in place and attentive to texture. What stands out most immediately is Charles’ ability to render the Cape not just as a setting, but as a sensory world. The language, the rhythm, the feel of it all is distinctly local, alive in a way that carries beyond description.
At its centre, Haram follows Muhammad as he comes to terms with his sexuality. His relationship with Riyaaz shifts something fundamental, forcing him to confront desires and truths that sit uneasily within the world he has been shaped by. His mother, Zaynab, holds clear expectations for the kind of man he should become, and with them, a script for how his life is meant to unfold.
The novel is most compelling in how it captures Muhammad’s struggle to belong. He does not simply reject the world around him, nor does he fully submit to it. Instead, he tries to hold onto both: the beauty, discipline and sense of promise within his religion and culture, while also beginning to question the ways in which they can wound and exclude.
That tension is not resolved neatly. It is lived, often painfully, in the space between devotion and self-recognition. Set against the backdrop of Cape Malay identity, the story moves through the friction between tradition and change, belonging and self-definition.
Muhammad’s difficulty in finding a place for himself is not abstract; it is intimate, constant, and shaped by the expectations that press in on him from family, faith and community.
Where the novel is strongest is in its atmosphere. Charles captures the cadence of the Cape, the particularity of its language, and the intimate details that anchor the story in a recognisable world. There is clear promise here, especially in the way he brings voice and place together.
Haram by Zubayr Charles was published in January 2026. Retail price: about R360. DM
Joy Watson is Book Editor-at-Large at Daily Maverick.