Burnt Sugar

By: Avni Doshi

Narrated by: Vineeta Rishi

Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

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

PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY the Guardian, Economist, Spectator and more...

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.

©2020 Avni Doshi (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Taut, unsettling, ferocious." (Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways)

"Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence - every sentence is a coiled spring and each psychological portrait burns itself into the mind. I couldn't put it down." (Olivia Sudjic, author of Exposure and Sympathy)

"Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us." (Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti)

Weird weird Booker year

This book is compared to Hot Milk, and for me the only comparison is that there is a strained mother/daughter relationship. This one was strained in ways I really cannot imagine. The writing was very good. Sometimes clever, sometimes excellent. The story was sometimes interesting and sometimes not. The characters were mostly unrelatable to me. Sometimes it was cultural, and sometimes it was decision making. Aside from some superb passages, reading this wasn’t an enjoyable experience.