Burnt Sugar: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 - Softcover

Doshi, Avni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024144151X ISBN 13: 9780241441510

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2020

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020: A searing, compulsively readable story of mothers and daughters, memory and madness, love and betrayal

'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times 

'Precisely written, resolutely unsentimental... A compelling book, beautifully written and with startling imagery - emotionally wrenching and poignant in equal measure' 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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, 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 woman who never cared for her.

This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery cords of memory and myth that bind two women together, and hold them apart.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 024144151X
• ISBN 13: 9780241441510
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240