Burnt Sugar

De: Avni Doshi

Narrado por: Vineeta Rishi

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...

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

'Utterly compelling, unflinching, written with poignancy and memorability' 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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence (Elle Hunt)

Extraordinary. Exquisitely written, painfully exhilarating, impossible to put down... An elegant family story that sizzles with hatred... Come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath

Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank... Horror stories from the past seep into the present, as Doshi builds her portrait of a fractured mother-daughter relationship

A masterclass. Crisp, engaging, perfectly tragic in the way that families often tend to be... Doshi writes sharply, in no-nonsense prose, not a single sentence in the book can be omitted... Avni Doshi is a force to watch out for in the literary world

A corrosive, compulsive debut

Subtle, intelligent, thrilling, visceral (Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)

This caustic tale of a destructive mother-daughter bond is as potent as its title might suggest... It bristles with sharp, chilly aphorisms... Doshi's visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain

Scouringly brilliant, a blazing debut that sticks in the mind like caramel blackened to the bottom of a pan... Doshi draws our relationships, both with the truth and with other people, with words that glitter sharp as shards of broken mirror

When does self-determination become selfishness? What can you learn from a bad mother? ...Sorrowful, sceptical and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters (Shahidha Bari)

A sly, slippery, often heartbreaking novel about the role memory plays within families

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.