Burnt Sugar

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What to expect

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020: A searing, compulsively readable story of mothers and daughters, memory and madness, love and betrayal

PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY the Guardian, Economist, Spectator and more...

'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times

'Utterly compelling, unflinching, written with poignancy and memorability' The Booker Prize Judges 2020

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, took a hapless artist for a lover, rebelled against every social expectation of a good Indian woman - all with her young child in tow. Years on, she is an old woman with a fading memory, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a mother who never seemed to care for her.

This is a poisoned love story. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar gradually untangles the knot of memory and myth that bind two women together, revealing the truth that lies beneath.

'An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence' Guardian

'A corrosive, compulsive debut' Daily Telegraph (*****)

'Scouringly brilliant, a blazing debut with words that glitter sharp as shards of broken mirror' Buro.

Critics Review

An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence
Guardian
Extraordinary. Exquisitely written, painfully exhilarating, impossible to put down... An elegant family story that sizzles with hatred... Come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath
Observer
Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank... Horror stories from the past seep into the present, as Doshi builds her portrait of a fractured mother-daughter relationship
Sunday Times
A masterclass. Crisp, engaging, perfectly tragic in the way that families often tend to be... Doshi writes sharply, in no-nonsense prose, not a single sentence in the book can be omitted... Avni Doshi is a force to watch out for in the literary world
Scroll
A corrosive, compulsive debut
Sunday Telegraph (five stars)
Subtle, intelligent, thrilling, visceral
Guardian
This caustic tale of a destructive mother-daughter bond is as potent as its title might suggest... It bristles with sharp, chilly aphorisms... Doshi's visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain
Daily Mail
Scouringly brilliant, a blazing debut that sticks in the mind like caramel blackened to the bottom of a pan... Doshi draws our relationships, both with the truth and with other people, with words that glitter sharp as shards of broken mirror
Buro.
When does self-determination become selfishness? What can you learn from a bad mother? ...Sorrowful, sceptical and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters
Guardian
A sly, slippery, often heartbreaking novel about the role memory plays within families
Stylist

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