Winner of the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and a Charles Pick Fellowship, Avni Doshi is the author of the upcoming literary fiction, Girl in White Cotton. Born in New Jersey, Avni completed her BA in art history from Barnard College and her MA in the history of art from University College London. A curator and art critic by training, she brings the same visual richness to her textual pursuits as she also writes for Harper’s Bazaar India, Elle India, Art Asia Pacific and Frieze.
Girl in White Cotton is a journey into shifting memories, altering identities and the subjective nature of truth. Tracing the fragile line between familial devotion and deception, Avni Doshi’s mesmerizing first novel will surprise and unsettle you.
The story revolves around Antara who has never understood her mother Tara’s decisions – walking out on her marriage to follow a guru, living on the streets like a beggar, shacking up with an unknown artist, rebelling against society’s expectations … But when Tara starts losing her memory, Antara searches for a way to make peace with their shared past, a past that haunts them both. As she relives her childhood in Pune in the eighties, Catholic boarding school in the hills of Maharashtra, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, Antara comes up against her own fears and neuroses, realizing she might not be so different from Tara after all.
The novel has received some heart-warming early praise from noted authors like –
“A courageously engaging novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.” – Tishani Doshi, author of Small Days and Nights
“A startling depiction of inter-generational damage, told in spare, elegant prose. This is a wonderful debut.”
– Prayaag Akbar, author of Leila
“This is a paper cut of a novel, a delicate glint of knife — finely sharp, impeccably insightful, carved from that mingled space of love, rage, and grief, the site of trauma handed down, generation upon generation. Here, all embellishment is discarded, all artifice shorn — off motherhood, family, memory, language — to reveal something about relationships, with ourselves and those closest to us, that holds a deeper, more devastating truth. Avni Doshi’s Girl in White Cotton, quietly, cleanly, slices through the heart.” – Janice Pariat, author of The Nine-Chambered Heart
Here’s a short excerpt from Girl in White Cotton to give you a sneak peek –
I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.
I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption – a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned.
But now, I can’t even the tally between us.
The reason is simple: my mother is forgetting, and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt. I used to bring up instances of her cruelty, casually, over tea, and watch her face curve into a frown. Now, she mostly can’t recall what I’m talking about; her eyes are distant with perpetual cheer. Anyone witnessing this will touch my hand and whisper: Enough now. She doesn’t remember, poor thing.
The sympathy she elicits in others gives rise to something acrid in me.
Publisher: HarperCollins India Price – Rs 599 Format – Hardcover
For more information please contact – shabnam.srivastava@harpercollins.co.in
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