Girl in White Cotton (Burnt Sugar) : Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

By Avni Doshi

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About the book

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020, AND PUBLISHED IN THE UK AS BURNT SUGAR

Utterly compelling, complex, unflinching realism – sometimes emotionally wrenching but also cathartic, written with poignancy and memorability. – The Booker Prize Judges 2020

Avni Doshi is a writer of surgical precision and sharp intelligence. This novel of mother-and-daughter resentments and the deep, intimate cuts of ancient family history gleams like a blade – both dangerous and beautiful. I loved it. – Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

Taut and unsettling, a dark, ferocious novel. – Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways

Antara 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, the time she spent at a 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.

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.

Pages: 288

Available in:

Language: English

Avni Doshi

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey. She completed her BA in art history from Barnard College and her MA in the history of art from University College London. Avni has been awarded the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and a Charles Pick Fellowship. She lives in Dubai.

Utterly compelling, complex, unflinching realism - sometimes emotionally wrenching but also cathartic, written with poignancy and memorability. - The Booker Prize Judges 2020

Avni Doshi is a writer of surgical precision and sharp intelligence. This novel of mother-and-daughter resentments and the deep, intimate cuts of ancient family history gleams like a blade — both dangerous and beautiful. I loved it. - Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

Taut and unsettling, a dark, ferocious novel. - Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways

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

Girl In White Cotton is stunning. It is beautifully grotesque, vivid, unexpected. Doshi knows her characters so intimately I felt I could reach out and touch the skin they're in. I can't wait for the world to read this novel. - Diksha Basu, author of The Windfall

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

Daring and deliciously dark, Burnt Sugar will keep you gripped until the very last sentence. - Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past is a Foreign Country

Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman's fight for her sense of self. - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days