Burnt Sugar: A Novel

Review\n“Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist. She knows the difference between a line and shade — both start the same way, but intention and style inform their difference. Doshi’s sentences are sharply drawn and devastatingly precise. There is never a wasted word, no debris, no flourish to hide behind. A voice this unadorned, and blunt, is so hauntingly stubborn and original, you want to hear from it again and again.”―New York Times Book Review\n“Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.”―The Washington Post\n“I read Burnt Sugar with awe, fury and compassion, electrified by the question of whether time does heal all wounds, and whether it even should."―Catherine Whelan, editor, NPR Morning Edition\n“Avni Doshi is a writer of surgical precision and sharp intelligence. This novel of mother-and-daughter resentments and the deep, intimate cuts of ancient family history gleams like a blade—both dangerous and beautiful. I loved it.” ―Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic\n“Burnt Sugar is absolutely exquisite.” ―Diksha Basu, author of Destination Wedding\n“Impressively assured…It’s the mother’s selfishness and instability that makes Antara such a complex character, hypersensitive, anxious and filled with rage.”\n―The San Francisco Chronicle\n"It’s rare that I read a novel so outrageous in both form and content, without either one feeling overdone, or like an afterthought. Doshi’s prose is sensual at every turn, blistering even when it really doesn’t need to be; it feels almost like being in a fever dream (or a sugar-addled coma, perhaps). And the story too is audacious, a scalpel-sharp portrait of a mother and daughter and what I can only describe as their competing realities. I don’t want to say any more here, because the surprises work well in this novel, but suffice it to say that it is very good, and a book I will be thinking about for a long time."―LitHub\n“Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence, but also brilliantly poetic and passionate—every sentence is a coiled spring.”―Olivia Sudjic, author of Exposure and Sympathy\n“Avni Doshi writes fearlessly, with a cruel, almost terrifying intelligence. I was discomfited and exhilarated by it.” ―Meng Jin, author of Little Gods\n“Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.”
―Publishers Weekly STARRED review\n“a landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath ... Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds.”―Kirkus STARRED review\n“A courageous novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.”―Tishani Doshi, author of Small Days and Nights\n“Raw, wise, and cuttingly funny.”―Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days\n“Burnt Sugar is an unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humor from the very first sentence.” ―Guardian\n“An intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting, Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, skeptical, and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.”―Guardian, Book of the Day\n“With a tightly controlled narrative voice and careful use of flashbacks … This is a layered, descriptive, at times distasteful novel that brings us face to face with our own darker impulses and deep-seated traumas.”―Chicago Review of Books\n“Doshi’s prose is arresting and her ideas fiercely intelligent.” ―Sunday Times\n“Burnt Sugar is an incredible novel with messages and characters that remain with its reader far beyond the final line.”―New York Journal of Books\n“Doshi’s visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain.” ―Daily Mail\n“