India, Sept. 14 -- Dear Reader,

I do not want to write about Mother Mary Comes to Me. And yet this is the book everyone is talking about.

Since the book released on August 28, there have been book events in bookstores all over the world. It's not surprising. Because mother daughter stories are primeval. And when the mother is a celebrated social activist and the daughter is the first Indian to win a Booker prize for her novel The God of Small Things, the world will inevitably lean in and ask - what is the real story ?

And here we have it - in Mother Mary Comes to Me. The mother is no more; it is the daughter who tells us the mother-daughter story. And yet when you read it, it feels like a story told from two sides, this is the magic of...