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The First House
- Author
- Avni Doshi
- Narrator
- Avni Doshi
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 16 July 2026
- Run Time
- 6 hours 28 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
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.
© Avni Doshi 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critics Review
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Vivid and vigorous, precise and unsparingly truthful . . . Once again Avni Doshi gives us a woman on the edge and a dreadful sense of the horror that lies, not entirely dormant, in the domestic
Financial Times
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The First House dissects the tyranny of family with surgical precision, unsparing in its depiction of the delusions of marriage and motherhood - the novel boils with brutal insight. Avni Doshi is among the finest prose stylists at work today; every page is exhilarating
Katie Kitamura, author of 'Audition'
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Dense and alert, distinct and dreamlike, Avni Doshi takes a single intimate relationship and excavates it… Its core experience [is] that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from wifehood
Guardian
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Like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a dagger point. But it is also lush, filled with symbols and signs and a kind of freedom that comes only through falling apart. I was consumed by this novel
Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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Taut and deliberate, punctuated by flashes of unsettling clarity . . . Doshi excels at rendering the interior life in all its contradictions, allowing tenderness and irritation, longing and resentment, to coexist without resolution . . . She is particularly deft at capturing this sense of disorientation, where grief does not present itself cleanly but seeps into the everyday
The New York Times Style Magazine
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Reflective, poignant, flush with strange, unsettling descriptions . . . Doshi shines in her ability to conjure the agitated atmosphere of the home . . . Shot through with symbolism, The First House is a novel about where we turn when things fall apart
Literary Review
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Potent, visceral and haunting, a fever-dream interspersed with myths and legends . . . There are many books about divorce. But there are very few good books about the unravelling of a marriage and the disintegration of a mind; this is one of them
The Conversation
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A hypnotic novel about the breakdown of a marriage... Over the course of a summer, we witness her life fall apart and then reshape with a hopeful sense of freedom
Elle, Summer Stories
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Dreamy, eerie, surreal - unerring, unsentimental, unflinchingly honest
Mail on Sunday
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Sharply intelligent, richly allegorical, unsparing psychodrama... An eviscerating study of the quiet violence of domestic discord, and the search for a new freedom
The Bookseller (Editor's Choice)
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Avni Doshi
- Narrator
- Avni Doshi
- Duration
- 6 hours 28 minutes
- Release Date
- 16 July 2026
- ISBN
- 9780241997307
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Family life fiction / Stories about family, Narrative theme: interior life / psychological fiction
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.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.© Avni Doshi 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
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