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View all search resultsFrom Roy to Loewenstein: Books as witnesses to memory and power
Across personal memory, cultural history and global conflict, several books published in 2025 continue to illuminate how power shapes lives and narratives.
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'The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World' by Antony Loewenstein.
(versobooks.com/-)
F
rom personal reckonings to historical reappraisals and geopolitical investigations, several books published in 2025 stand out for their ability to illuminate the present by revisiting the past. Spanning memoir, photography, art history and longform reportage, the titles continue to resonate well beyond their year of release, offering readers context at a time when memory, identity and power remain fiercely contested.
Mother Mary Comes to Me
By Arundhati Roy
In this memoir, Arundhati Roy, the Indian author who won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997, revisits her childhood in Kerala and her fraught relationship with her mother, Mary Roy.
Mary was an educator and women’s rights activist who successfully challenged patriarchal inheritance laws at India’s Supreme Court in 1986, securing equal property rights for women in the Syrian Christian community. At home, however, Roy portrays her as a volatile figure, both shelter and storm, a contradiction that shaped their relationship and led the author to love her mother “from afar” from the age of 18.
Balancing painful recollections with humor, irony and moments of tenderness, Roy delivers an intimate narrative that not only confronts family trauma but also sheds light on the emotional and political forces that shaped one of the world’s most influential literary voices.
