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Burnt Sugar
Cover of Burnt Sugar
Burnt Sugar
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020
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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.

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.

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  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from January 11, 2021
    Doshi’s stunning second novel (after Girl in White Cotton), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, explores the murky, toxic relationship between a mother and daughter living in the Indian city of Pune. Antara, a reflective, recently married artist, notices something is off with her volatile, demanding mother, Tara. Doctors believe it’s early-onset dementia but can’t find biological evidence of the disease, causing Antara to wonder if her mother is willfully forgetting her. She concludes her mother named her Antara (“Un-Tara”) “because she hated herself,” setting up a dynamic in which the two women became pitted against each other. She reexamines her early years living in an ashram, where her mother landed after leaving her husband. There, Tara fell in love with the ashram leader but neglected her daughter, not seeing Antara for weeks at a time. The young Antara refused to eat and eventually resigned herself to self-sufficiency to avoid beatings from her mother. Tara’s rejection of her daughter continues after Antara’s grandparents send her to boarding school against her will and Tara neglects to intervene, and Tara later criticizes Antara’s teenage body. Yet by the captivating conclusion, Tara’s memory loss proves too much for Antara, causing the daughter to react in ways she never expected. Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.

  • Shahidha Bari An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence
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Burnt Sugar
Burnt Sugar
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020
Avni Doshi
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