Avni Doshi

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth – for readers of Katie Kitamura, Deborah Levy, Gwendoline Riley and Elena Ferrante ‘I married my husband to live in a fairy tale. I imagined us like planets orbiting the sun or gods enacting their myths. Marriage was a solution and I wanted to be dissolved.’ A woman’s husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her that he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage, an almost perfect marriage. In the following days, marooned with two young daughters in a hostile suburb, the woman starts coming apart. As she sifts through the ruins of their shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into the forest of her own mind, where marital memories intermingle with myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses, messages hidden in the constellations, glimpses of a natural world seething and alive with portents. Over the course of a single summer, as the cicadas that have been buried in the ground for seventeen years prepare to emerge and fill the air with a plague of ecstatic transformation, the woman too is splitting, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light. This is a novel about unhappy families – about poison seeping through the domestic space, the bloody battlefield of the home, the enduring threat posed by those closest to us. Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, it is a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth.

अंतराला आपल्या आईने घेतलेल्या निर्णयांमागील - गुरूसाठी लग्नबंधन तोडणं; भिकार्]यासारखं रस्त्यावर मुक्काम करणं; अनोळखी चित्रकाराबरोबर एकत्र राहणं - कारणं कधीही समजली नाहीत... पण ताराला स्मृतिभ्रंश होऊ लागल्यावर मात्र त्या दोघींना छळणार्]या, त्यांच्या सामायिक भूतकाळाशी तडजोड करण्यासाठी अंतराने प्रयत्न सुरू केले. या प्रयत्नांमध्येच अंतराला स्वत च्या मनात दडलेल्या चिंता, अकारण वाटणारं भय आणि तारापेक्षा मीदेखील फारशी वेगळी नाही या वास्तवाची लख्ख जाणीव झाली. हे पुस्तक कौटुंबिक बंध आणि वंचना यातील अस्पष्ट रेषेचा वेध घेते. ही कादंबरी वाचकांना एकाच वेळी चकित आणि अस्वस्थ करते.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar is a searing literary debut novel set in India about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal. "I would be lying if I say my mother's misery has never given me pleasure," says Antara, Tara's now-adult daughter. This is a love story and a story about betrayal--not between lovers but between a mother and a daughter. . . . In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, embarked on a stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing a disheveled, homeless "artist," all with little Antara in tow. But now Tara is forgetting things, and Antara is an adult--an artist and married--and must search for a way to make peace with a past that haunts her as she confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter: Is Tara's memory loss real? Are Antara's memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Avni Doshi tells a story at once shocking and empathetic of a mother-daughter relationship and a daughter's search for self. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is the stunning and unforgettable debut of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

This is a tale of obsession and betrayal. This is a poisoned love story. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Tara and Antara, the woman and her angry shadow. But which one is which? Sharp as a blade and compulsively readable, Burnt Sugar slowly untangles the knot of memory and fiction that binds two women together, revealing the truth that lies beneath.