Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982 and is currently based in Dubai. She won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 2014. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. The novel is published in India as Girl in White Cotton, where it won the Sushila Devi Award 2021.

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 'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times 'Exquisite . . . A work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication' Washington Post 'A sly, slippery, often heartbreaking novel about the role memory plays within families' Stylist 'Extraordinary . . . Come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath' Observer.