Burnt Sugar A Novel

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar is a searing literary debut novel set in India about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal.

“I would be lying if I say my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” says Antara, Tara’s now-adult daughter.

This is a love story and a story about betrayal—not between lovers but between a mother and a daughter. . . . In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, embarked on a stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing a disheveled, homeless “artist,” all with little Antara in tow.

But now Tara is forgetting things, and Antara is an adult—an artist and married—and must search for a way to make peace with a past that haunts her as she confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter: Is Tara’s memory loss real? Are Antara’s memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Avni Doshi tells a story at once shocking and empathetic of a mother-daughter relationship and a daughter’s search for self. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is the stunning and unforgettable debut of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and rights have been sold in 21 countries. She studied art history at Barnard College and earned her MA in the history of art at University College, London. She was awarded the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. Doshi lives in Dubai with her family.