Burnt Sugar

Critics Review

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

• 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

• 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

• A raw, vividly described exploration of the toxic relationship between two women who are forever bound together

  Good Housekeeping

• Burnt Sugar straddles the line between pain and beauty. It makes the stomach churn. And, like all great literature, it prompts the question of the reader: is this you?

  Bad Form

• Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence – every sentence is a coiled spring and each psychological portrait burns itself into the mind. I couldn’t put it down

• Daring and deliciously dark, Burnt Sugar will keep you gripped until the very last sentence

• Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman’s fight for her sense of self

• Avni Doshi quietly, cleanly, slices through the heart… Impeccably insightful, carved from love, rage, and grief, here all embellishment is discarded, all artifice shorn – motherhood, family, memory, language – to reveal something devastating about our relationships, with ourselves and with those closest to us

  Janice Pariat, author of 'The Nine-Chambered Heart'

• A brilliant debut, about mothers and daughters, that manages be acerbic and brittle all at the same time

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

  Tishani Doshi, author of 'Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods'

• Beautifully grotesque, vivid, unexpected. Doshi knows her characters so intimately I felt I could reach out and touch the skin they’re in

  Diksha Basu, author of 'The Windfall'

• Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us

• A disturbing tale of memory and forgetfulness, questioning the relevance and the authenticity of both

  Indian Express

• Taut, unsettling, ferocious

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