Avni Doshi - Böcker

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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021WINNER OF THE SUSHILA DEVI AWARD 2021NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2021A searing debut novel about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal - for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk and Diana Evans'Beautifully written, emotionally wrenching and poignant in equal measure' The Booker Prize Judges 2020'An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence' Guardian'I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure.'This is a tale of obsession and betrayal. This is a poisoned love story. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Tara and Antara, a woman and her angry shadow. But which one is which?Sharp as a blade and compulsively readable, Burnt Sugar slowly untangles the knot of memory and rumour that binds two women together, revealing the truth that lies beneath.'A work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication' Washington Post'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times '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