Burnt Sugar: A Novel

by Avni Doshi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419752933
Publisher:	The Overlook Press
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and rights have been sold in 21 countries. She studied art history at Barnard College and earned her MA in the history of art at University College, London. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. Doshi lives in Dubai with her family.

Editorial Reviews

Avni Doshi writes fearlessly, with a cruel, almost terrifying intelligence. I was discomfited and exhilarated by it.

author of Little Gods - Meng Jin

Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.”

Publishers Weekly STARRED review

Doshi’s visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain.

Daily Mail

Raw, wise, and cuttingly funny.

author of Starling Days - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Burnt Sugar is an unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humor from the very first sentence.

Guardian

I read Burnt Sugar with awe, fury and compassion, electrified by the question of whether time does heal all wounds, and whether it even should."

editor, NPR Morning Edition - Catherine Whelan

Doshi’s prose is arresting and her ideas fiercely intelligent.

Sunday Times

Burnt Sugar is an incredible novel with messages and characters that remain with its reader far beyond the final line.

New York Journal of Books

a landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath ... Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds.

Kirkus STARRED review

Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.

The Washington Post

Burnt Sugar is absolutely exquisite.

author of Destination Wedding - Diksha Basu

Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence, but also brilliantly poetic and passionate—every sentence is a coiled spring.

author of Exposure and Sympathy - Olivia Sudjic

A corrosive, compulsive debut.

Daily Telegraph

With a tightly controlled narrative voice and careful use of flashbacks … This is a layered, descriptive, at times distasteful novel that brings us face to face with our own darker impulses and deep-seated traumas.

Chicago Review of Books

An intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting, Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, skeptical, and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.

Book of the Day Guardian

Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist. She knows the difference between a line and shade — both start the same way, but intention and style inform their difference. Doshi’s sentences are sharply drawn and devastatingly precise. There is never a wasted word, no debris, no flourish to hide behind. A voice this unadorned, and blunt, is so hauntingly stubborn and original, you want to hear from it again and again.

New York Times Book Review

Impressively assured…It’s the mother’s selfishness and instability that makes Antara such a complex character, hypersensitive, anxious and filled with rage.”

The San Francisco Chronicle

Avni Doshi is a writer of surgical precision and sharp intelligence. This novel of mother-and-daughter resentments and the deep, intimate cuts of ancient family history gleams like a blade—both dangerous and beautiful. I loved it.

author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert

The words in Avni Doshi’s “Burnt Sugar” hit you like a bullet... Regardless of your cultural background, “Burnt Sugar” will pulse with an addictive and thrilling energy. Every sentence is a treasure to read and brings you one step closer to yourself, even though you didn’t ask for it.

Michigan Daily

"It’s rare that I read a novel so outrageous in both form and content, without either one feeling overdone, or like an afterthought. Doshi’s prose is sensual at every turn, blistering even when it really doesn’t need to be; it feels almost like being in a fever dream (or a sugar-addled coma, perhaps). And the story too is audacious, a scalpel-sharp portrait of a mother and daughter and what I can only describe as their competing realities. I don’t want to say any more here, because the surprises work well in this novel, but suffice it to say that it is very good, and a book I will be thinking about for a long time."

LitHub

A courageous novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.

author of Small Days and Nights - Tishani Doshi

Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist. She knows the difference between a line and shade — both start the same way, but intention and style inform their difference. Doshi’s sentences are sharply drawn and devastatingly precise. There is never a wasted word, no debris, no flourish to hide behind. A voice this unadorned, and blunt, is so hauntingly stubborn and original, you want to hear from it again and again.”—New York Times Book Review

“Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.”—The Washington Post

“I read Burnt Sugar with awe, fury and compassion, electrified by the question of whether time does heal all wounds, and whether it even should."—Catherine Whelan, editor, NPR Morning Edition

“Avni Doshi is a writer of surgical precision and sharp intelligence. This novel of mother-and-daughter resentments and the deep, intimate cuts of ancient family history gleams like a blade—both dangerous and beautiful. I loved it.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic

“Burnt Sugar is absolutely exquisite.” —Diksha Basu, author of Destination Wedding

“Impressively assured…It’s the mother’s selfishness and instability that makes Antara such a complex character, hypersensitive, anxious and filled with rage.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

"It’s rare that I read a novel so outrageous in both form and content, without either one feeling overdone, or like an afterthought. Doshi’s prose is sensual at every turn, blistering even when it really doesn’t need to be; it feels almost like being in a fever dream (or a sugar-addled coma, perhaps). And the story too is audacious, a scalpel-sharp portrait of a mother and daughter and what I can only describe as their competing realities. I don’t want to say any more here, because the surprises work well in this novel, but suffice it to say that it is very good, and a book I will be thinking about for a long time."—LitHub

“Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence, but also brilliantly poetic and passionate—every sentence is a coiled spring.”—Olivia Sudjic, author of Exposure and Sympathy

“Avni Doshi writes fearlessly, with a cruel, almost terrifying intelligence. I was discomfited and exhilarated by it.” —Meng Jin, author of Little Gods

“Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.”
—Publishers Weekly STARRED review

“a landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath ... Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds.”—Kirkus STARRED review

“A courageous novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.”—Tishani Doshi, author of Small Days and Nights

“Raw, wise, and cuttingly funny.”—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days

“Burnt Sugar is an unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humor from the very first sentence.” —Guardian

“An intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting, Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, skeptical, and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.”—Guardian, Book of the Day

“With a tightly controlled narrative voice and careful use of flashbacks … This is a layered, descriptive, at times distasteful novel that brings us face-to-face with our own darker impulses and deep-seated traumas.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Doshi’s prose is arresting and her ideas fiercely intelligent.” —Sunday Times

“Burnt Sugar is an incredible novel with messages and characters that remain with its reader far beyond the final line.”—New York Journal of Books

“Doshi’s visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain.” —Daily Mail

“A corrosive, compulsive debut.” —Daily Telegraph

“The words in Avni Doshi’s “Burnt Sugar” hit you like a bullet... Regardless of your cultural background, “Burnt Sugar” will pulse with an addictive and thrilling energy. Every sentence is a treasure to read and brings you one step closer to yourself, even though you didn’t ask for it.”—Michigan Daily

From the Publisher

‘Burnt Sugar’ is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.”

Washington Post

★ 2020-11-18
Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds.

“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” This is the devastating opening sentence of American writer Doshi’s provocative debut, which offers a fierce, compelling depiction of the painfully intertwined lives of a mother and daughter in Pune, India. Tara, the mother, was neglectful and careless; Antara, the daughter, will become her unwilling but affixed life companion. Abandoning a gloomy marriage to join an ashram and become the lover of Baba, its leader, Tara exhibits a pattern of inadequate parenting that continues, four years later, when Baba replaces her with a younger model. Tara and Antara, now 7, are next to be found begging outside the Club in Pune, eventually to be rescued by Antara’s father, who, meanwhile, has divorced Tara and is remarrying. These and other episodes from the past—including Tara’s later love affair with an unreliable artist and Antara’s lonely months spent at an abusive boarding school—are sandwiched between slices of the contemporary narrative. Here Tara is sliding into dementia and Antara, comfortably married to Dilip, is trying to care for the parent whose care of her was so disastrous. Antara’s voice is frank, skeptical, even comical while exposing the fragile psychology life has dealt her. Above all, she scrutinizes the unbreakable/unbearable link to a figure who haunts and half subsumes her, a razor’s edge which Doshi captures in simple, effective prose: “Even now, when I…want to be without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness—that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft, white cotton that has frayed at the edge.”

A landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath.

Kirkus Reviews