The First House: From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar - Hardcover

Doshi, Avni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241819083 ISBN 13: 9780241819081

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2026

Synopsis

‘Vivid and vigorous, precise and unsparingly truthful . . . Excellent’ Financial Times

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

'Unsparing, exhilarating. This novel boils with brutal insight. Avni Doshi is among the finest prose stylists at work today' Katie Kitamura

'Lush and sharpened to a dagger point... I was consumed by this novel' Amina Cain

‘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.

About this title

About the Author

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020, longlisted for the Women's Prize 2021, and won the Sushila Devi Award 2021. It was named a Book of the Year by the Guardian, Economist, Spectator, New York Times Book Review and NPR and has been translated into 26 languages. Avni Doshi's writing has appeared in British Vogue, Granta and the Sunday Times. Her second novel will be published in July 2026; it is called The First House.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241819083
• ISBN 13: 9780241819081
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240