"Hallucinations, inhabiting the past, an archaic sense of self, a deep feeling of isolation. The present is seen for what it is, a fleck always slipping through the sieve"

Burnt Sugar opens with the striking line:

"I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure."

And goes on:

"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."

which immediately sets up two of the book’s main themes, difficult mother-daughter relationships and the unreliability of memory (whether Alzheimer’s induced, or selective).

The book was first published in India in 2019 under the title "Girl in White Cotton", the change for the UK edition, per the author, "a collaborative decision came after hearing my UK editor Hermione Thompson’s concerns about whether the original title would translate in the same way for a UK audience,” which was interesting, as the book generally had a flavour of being written for an international not local market, with a lot of description of the setting in Pune.

This is a debut novel, which had been through many iterations, and the author cites one key influence on the final version as a non-fiction piece she wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, “worked as a kind of spark for this draft of the novel– it offered me an entry point into my character.”

The piece (https://www.avnidoshi.com/a-feast-of-love) includes this anecdote about the author’s own grandmother:

"Nani is smiling, happy. I wish I could be happy, but I want too badly to remember all the flavours my grandmother has fed me, every dish that has come out of her kitchen, the ideal season for each vegetable. Our family comes together around my grandmother's kindness and her meals. From far away places, we make yearly pilgrimages to marvel that something can still taste so good. We share stories, hurl insults, we fight, and make up. Every bite is a memory.

But we knew something was wrong the day Nani couldn't remember a recipe. A simple Sindhi pickle, made with cauliflower, carrot, mustard, and rye. She used to know it like the back of her hand. The doctor says this is just the beginning, that eventually she will forget my name.

We are losing a little bit of her everyday. I tell my shrink my heart is breaking but the truth is I feel it most in my stomach, in the watery unease of my gut."

In this novel, Antara, the first person narrator, shares with her grandmother the burden of her mother’s amnesia, including mis-remembering recipes, which she tries to stimulate by leaving notes in her house of significant moments in their life. But sometimes Antara’s own memories are flawed.

"Nani is holding a crumpled piece of paper in her claw.

‘I was leaving notes for Ma around the house. So she can find them and read them. Maybe it will help her memory.’

Nani smiles. ‘You’re a good girl. Read it to me.’

I hesitate and press the scrap against my palm. In a few weeks, it has begun to look like ancient parchment. ‘The time you added chilli to Antara’s khichdi,’ I read.

Nani laughs, and coughs when I finish reading. ‘When was that?’

‘She wanted me to learn to eat spicy food, I guess. She wouldn’t stop, even though I developed a bad case of the hiccups.’

Nani shakes her head. ‘Your mother didn’t add the chilli to your khichdi. I added ginger to it because you had a very bad cold.’

‘That’s not true,’ I say. I was sure I remembered it, the taste of pain in my mouth.

‘I’m telling you,’ she said. ‘Have you asked her? She will tell you.’

I had read that one to Ma and she had looked at me vacantly before I stuffed it into the sofa for her to find again. ‘Even if I ask her,’ I say to Nani, ‘she doesn’t remember.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t remember because it never happened.’"

The author has mentioned the influence on her writing of Levy, Offill, Cusk and Heti, of Lispector and Jaeggy, but also Marias and, notably, Garcia Marquez.

"As I was researching, I couldn’t help but return to One Hundred Years of Solitude where throughout the book you get a sense that a contagion of amnesia is taking over the village, generation by generation. It’s fantastical in the novel, but is remarkably like the experience of being with someone with Alzheimer’s."

This was a novel that left with me mixed feeling. Antara herself is a complex and fascinating character, and her relationship with her mother, and their different memories of the past made for an excellent read, and it was linked neatly with Antara’s own artwork (based on the author’s own).

However, as often with debut novels, the author has tried to pack a lot of themes in. Unlike some of that ilk, the resulting novel is admirably compact (c240 pages) but that means many of the themes and characters – the city of Pune, the ashram to which her mother decamped for several years when Antara was a young child to become the lover of the guru (based on the real-life Rajneesh), the women in the ashram who became a sort of surrogate mother, both women’s relationship with another artist, Antara’s husband and his aspirations to return overseas, even (a theme which was clearly key for the author) Antara’s own experience of motherhood – end up as fleeting themes; for example the last of these appears only in the last 10% of the novel. At times it felt like this might have worked better as a much shorter novel (with some themes left for future books) or the opposite i.e. a much longer work.

Nevertheless, a worthy inclusion on the Booker longlist and a striking debut. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.

I read this book (which was originally published in India as “Girl in White Cotton” due to its longlisting for the 2020 Booker Prize: an intriguing longlist noticeable for featuring 9 US based authors, 9 female authors and 8 debutant novelists – with this book representing one of the 4 books at the intersection of that Venn diagram – albeit the US born author now lives in Dubai.

The book is narrated in the first person by Antara, who lives in Pune, India with her US born husband but whose defining relationship is with her mother Tara. When Antara was young, Tara left her husband and for several years lived at an Ashram as the disciple and mistress of the legendary guru – becoming estranged as a result not just from her husband and parents but also from the young Antara, in a breech that never possibly healed.

Now years later, Tara, who lives alone, is starting to suffer the early signs of dementia and Antara forced into the role of a carer, a role made harder by her lifelong difficult relationship with her mother. Ironically just as her mother starts to lose her memory and grip on reality, Antara is forced to confront her own past behaviour and its implications for her own marriage. This tension exacerbated by two other generations: Tara’s own mother (still living independently and whose memory of history does not always align with the story that Antara has told herself) and Antara’s new born daughter (whose arrival simultaneously causes post-partum depression in Antara and further unsettles Tara (who believes the girl to be her own baby Antara).

A key theme of the book (and one that makes it an interesting companion to the non-dystopian part of “The New Wilderness”) is its investigation of the relationship between mother and daughter and how it evolves for both parties from birth, through early attachment and nourishment to childhood independence, teenage rebellion, the daughter’s own motherhood and then to parental dependency.

Antara (Un-Tara) is deliberately named to be unlike and separated from her mother “designated as her undoing”), but in fact entwined for life (“I often wished she had never been born, knowing this would wipe me out as well – I understood how deeply connected we were, and how her destruction would irrevocably lead to my own” – something that then happens as her mother’s own decline seems to be accompanied by her own desperation, then pregnancy to try and save things and then post-partum depression.

Another key character in the novel is Kali Mata (once Eve) and she acts as something of a surrogate maternal figure for the young Antara, he name symbolically drawing on both Jewish and Hindu icons of ambiguous motherhood.

Other key ideas, very explicitly addressed in the book are:

- Memories, how they develop and how as well as being personal they are effectively in common (if disputed) ownership between those who first experience them. What are the implication for this common ownership if one of the owners begins to lose possession.


- Belonging and exclusion. The Ashram gave Tara a sense of community and Antara a sense of exclusion from her previously nascent roots. Antara’s husband as an NRI feels like he neither fully belongs in the US or (with his Western ideas, snobberies and morals) in India. A photojournalist lover of Tara, fleeing the Mumbai riots, is taken in by a family who he then marries in to, only to find that others question his motives and his work.

- Obsession – Antara in particular relentlessly catalogues and collects: sleights when she is a child; objects as she grows up; facts as she tries to understand her mother’s condition and does her own research into the links with diabetes and gut bacteria (something which has darker implications later)

- Art history – the author was an art critic and exhibition curator and ideas from art permeate both the book’s structure and its narrative. An art project that Antara has carried on for three years (see below) forms a key part of the tension in her relationships. Antara also uses art to try and come to terms with her research into dementia – sketching her research and ideas on papers. It is part of the meta-approach which permeates this novel that of course the author (whose grandmother’s own diagnosis with dementia part way through the writing of this novel gave it its final form) is using her own art form – novel writing – to sketch out her own research

The other concept that came out strongly to me in my reading of the book was the idea of a palimpsest in its broadest sense – of art or ideas being written on previous attempts.

We see it in the discussion of how memories are created and developed. There are references to the Brazilian 1920s avant-garde concept of “Anthropafagio” – the cannibalization of Western art; there is an exhibit based around artists re-interpreting “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (note this is I based I believe on an exhibit the author herself curated in Mumbai 2012: very much unlike her character “One Hundred Years of Solitude is not “a book I had never heard of, much less read” being in fact one of her favourite high school stories, and the idea of the insomnia plague that hits Macondo drove her initial idea of exploring the loss of memory and the idea of categorisation and labelling); at one stage Antara explores her Mother’s layers of clothes which set out the story of her life (wedding saris, bridal trousseau, Ashram robes); a key location is the Poona club – which the author represents as a key part of post-independence Indian society written over the legacy of colonialism; we see it in Antara’s crucial art project -a three year project to draw the same face each day, based only on copying the previous day’s painting.

And again referring to the very meta nature of this book – what I find interesting is that the novel itself can be seen in these terms. It was written over seven years in around 8 drafts – with different persons (first/third), tenses, narrators, voices and settings. And the author has I understand taken the old manuscripts and formed them into an art project - wrapping them around her husband’s golf balls (his idea as something that needs redoing every day, building on past failures and successes).

Overall I feel that this is one of the more ambiguous novels on the longlist. On one level a relatively simple story, on the other one which weaves in a series of ideas and concepts.

It is one with a touch of the Eileen Moshfegh and which shows the literary influence (acknowledged by the author) of Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk. However the author I was most reminded of was Ariana Harwicz and her “Involuntary” trilogy.

Overall I found this a worthwhile and intriguing addition to the longlist.

Synopsis: In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless ‘artist’ – all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, 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 woman who never cared for her.This is a love story and it is a story about betrayal. But not between lovers – between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Avni Doshi tests the limits of what we can know for certain about those we are closest to, and by extension, about ourselves.

Review: Okay *sits down* *gets comfortable* I didn’t like this book. I know mine will be an unpopular opinion but I really struggled with it. It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t to my liking so please don’t let this review put you off from reading it – I encourage you all to read it should you wish to.

Firstly, something I noticed early on was the severe lack of chapters. This book has no chapters but instead is separated into chunks of years of the life of Antara. I found the first half of the book to lack any kind of concise and logical linear timeline. One moment you are reading about the MC’s husband wanting to be a vegetarian and then suddenly the MC is talking about a giant. The lack of chapters or paragraphs that separate this information made the story (which is very jumpy) extremely hard to follow.

Now, about that jumpy storyline. I’d describe it as tangents. Jumping in and out of the ‘present’ telling stories of the past interwoven with other stories often causing me to lose sight and focus of the current year and predicament of the MC. I noted that it was confusing and exhausting.

On a positive note, some of the stories are very nice, and the diary like narration created a great insight into Indian culture and traditions.

It was around the 64% mark that I finally realised that this book does not have a plot-driven storyline. It was also at this point that I learnt that I hate books without plot-driven storylines. I found it very hard to find the enthusiasm to read this book. Additionally, because of the lack of chapters I had to set aside large chunks of time (up to an hour) to sit down and read just a single “chapter” because the story is difficult to follow if you put it down half way through a “chapter”.

I completely understand the Booker nomination though, Doshi’s writing is incredible. Just the way she describes contractions and labor and her relationship to food is incredible. It honestly did take my breath away at some moments. But i’m afraid other than that I was not in love with this book at all.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House (UK) for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

2/5 Stars

Antara is a middle class Indian woman. Her husband, Dilip, is an American Indian (no, not one of those) who was sent by his company to Pune despite hardly speaking a word of Hindi and breaking his rotis with two hands. What had been a very happy, westernised relationship is now transformed by the arrival of Antara's senile mother and the imminent arrival of a baby. Antara is less than thrilled by her change in circumstances as she explains to readers in sassy, sarcastic tones.

Antara loathes her mother, but she is honour bound to support her. The mother - Tara to her daughter's Un-tara - seems to have made curious decisions in the past. Antara was sent to a strict school run by nuns. Tara separated from her wealthy husband and became a beggar outside the Club - that haven of the middle classes. Tara joined the Ashram and wore white, despite not being in mourning. Antara resents this, and resents the intrusion Tara is making on her now comfortable life as a conceptual artist.

The real strength of the novel is Antara's voice. She is self-entitled, whining, rude, ungrateful and hilarious. She may well have cause for complaint, but her petulance in putting that view across gives the reader a strange sense of schadenfreude. The legitimacy of her complaints is further undermined as the reader gradually discovers the appalling way she has behaved as an adult. There are vignette like chapters - almost like Slumdog Millionaire - with each one offering a different facet of life in India, spanning the social classes. There are real, compassionate characters in the novel. But always, there is Antara's voice.

Burnt Sugar is not a long novel and it is tempting to start all over again to extract every drop of brilliance from this novel that starts so sweetly and becomes so bitter.

A story about families that , on the one hand submerged me in a different environment and on the other showed the universality of such experience

Mother - daughter issues. Love, betrayal, illness, always in search to find self.
Shocking punch in a gut.

Raw, dark and very well written debut novel.

A dark tale set in contemporary India about a young woman who takes in her ageing mother who has started to experience memory loss. As the story unfolds we discover their fraught relationship and how neglectful Antara's mother was when she was growing up - at one point choosing to become a beggar, chasing inappropriate men - Tara's memory loss brings back these memories for her daughter.

This isn't what I'd call an enjoyable read but there's clearly a lot of skill at work here, both in the crafting of the story and the writing itself. Recommended, but this isn't for the faint of heart.

If I could describe Burnt Sugar in one word, it would be shocking.

I learned about this book because I heard about the author at a literary festival and we got the chance to briefly meet. I knew that the book is about being a woman, and the struggles that came with it. However, I was not prepared for what this book actually was.

Written in the first person point of view, the book follows the protagonist, Antara-who appears to be in her 30s-through her journey trying to figure herself out while hustling through her life. The writing is sharp and urgent, which is a beautiful reflection of Antara's mindset and the struggles she's going through. She has a mom who suffers from memory loss, whom she takes care for. She marries a man and has duties of being a wife. Deep down, she's also an artist at heart who is trying to fulfill her career. There are also certain cultural and religious expectations set out on her life. When all these things are put together, Antara copes in unconventional ways and they're all valid.

What really resonated with me are the themes of trying to understand oneself even when you're an adult, trying to fight for the things that make you happy. But at the same time, what really is happy? Who defines it? Is it us? Is it our circumstances? Is it both? These are questions that you might not really find an answer to, but the author masterfully weaved all these themes together through the life and actions of Antara.

The last few pages were a punch to the gut with how emotional they were, and I'm sure the author put a lot of heart into it.

I don't know, somehow the book reminded me of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. They're not alike whatsoever, but perhaps the themes of identity and belonging made those parallels.

This is a solid debut, and I think it's an interesting read about understanding oneself.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi is about a difficult relationship between a mother and daughter both in the present when the daughter is dealing with her ageing mother’s memory problems and in the past when they faced conflict as she was growing up.

This a debut novel by an exciting new Indian-American author now living in Dubai. The novel is set in India and follows a mother/daughter relationship during the course of the mother declining into dementia. The daughter whose perspective we follow endured neglect and abuse at the hand of her mother and now finds herself faced with a mother who cannot remember the past and her own potential to become abusive. None of the characters in the book is nice, some said the main character's husband was nice. Hm, I guess it depends on your definition of nice. All relationships are problematic and painful and at times this was absolutely unbearable to read and if I am honest I am not quite sure what kept me going. It was a good debut, but just left me emotionally stranded not knowing what to make of it at all.

The story is full of promise and the theme of the relationship between a daughter and her aging and dying mother is absolutely up my alley. "Burnt Sugar"'s narrative structure is fairly fluid, which makes for a compelling character, as she contemplates on her past and present situation, however, I was just not being as engrossed in this book as I expected to.

I absolutely loved this book, even though it kept punching me in the gut. The relationship between the two women, mother and daughter, is so complex and raw. Being absolutely maddening and harrowing at times, yet still so poignant. It is written so beautifully and the prose is so vivid and emotional. Each character is so well fleshed out it feels like I could be reading a memoir at times. It’s so realistic, sometimes too realistic in the mother-daughter relationship that I had to take a break from reading as it got just too emotional for me.

The story deals with a lot of things, but the main themes I felt running through it were grief, neglect, obsession and betrayal, and the complicated ways both women display, enact or hide these feelings and experiences. It’s rare that a book can elicit all of these often scary emotions whilst still keeping you coming back. This is a new favourite.

I’d recommend Burnt Sugar to people who have strained or complex relationships with their parents, especially women with their mothers, who are looking for a cathartic examination of these strained relationships. Take care when reading through, as it can get Too Real at times. Even if you don’t share these strained relationships in real life, I’d still recommend giving this book a try, it is so beautiful and honestly written that I think everyone could appreciate a part of it in their own way. Out 30 July 2020 from Hamish Hamilton.

The story explores a complicated relationship, between mother-daughter. While at every turn the narrator, daughter,let's the reader know how she feels about her mother,she hardly scrapes the surface of why she feels so.
That's the reason why I found the story to be indulgent, incomplete and bit of a rant.

The story is literally set in the part of the world I live in and I couldn't even connect with that part. 30% in and I skipped the whole sort and read the last 5% and did not feel like I missed most of the book. 1 star for the effort of this diary like narration.

Disclaimer - I received a free digital download of this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The book seems to gravitate around a mother-daughter relationship full of toxic emotions and abuse. What happens when the abuser starts to forget and the abused is left with nothing but the hateful memories and a woman she barely recognises.

Will she let go of her past animosity and take her mother as she is now, letting go of all the built up emotions inside of her or will her hate consume her and her interactions with her ailing guardian.

We follow the story of Antara through the complexities of her relationship with her mother growing up and the current day version of her mother slowly loosing her mind to Alzheimer’s. Then on to the daughter becoming a mother herself. Its a powerful read that encourages you to look at humanity and the nuances of relationships and how actions alter the eb and flow of all interactions.

I think it also casts a thoughtful eye on what it’s like to have a family member with Alzheimer’s and the emotional rollercoaster associated with their derailment into loss of cognitive ability. An interesting read to say the least.

This is a book about horrible things, things that the majority of us would much prefer to look away from and pretend we don't see, and the kind of things that we hope will never happen to us in the course of our lifetimes. Our children are not under obligation to love us, but as parents, is there an obligation to love our children? This book looks at the relationship between a mother and daughter, but not a normal, healthy one. Instead, it examines a relationship laced with bitterness, hatred, competitiveness, and resentment, all of which awkwardly hold hands with the love that we believe is obliged to exist between a mother and daughter.

The atmosphere is created to be very heavy and reading this book feels like walking on eggshells in the sense that every single move made by the main character may result in her mother snapping. The revolving door of her mother's emotions makes her constantly vulnerable, not just to attack but to attacks so vicious and from someone who is meant to be so trustworthy that it makes it all the harder. Caring for her mother in the throes of dementia and having to take on the carer role to someone who was not the best of carers to her as a child is a bitter pill to swallow- especially in the face of her mother's pushback.

The prose in this book is vicious and it does not pull any punches- it is borne from a place of what seems like rage, and in a way, that's something we don't see enough of. Yes, it's horrible, but at the same time, these are real narratives. There are parents who do little else but tear their children down in the worst possible ways, and cause their rebellion, and then become unsure themselves as to how to approach parenthood. There is a lot to pick from this book and to analyse, and so it's well worth a look, but especially so if you want to look at how toxicity can worm its way into the bones of children and sit there, corroding them from the inside out, into adulthood and beyond.

A searing debut novel about an obsessive, destructive mother-daughter relationship. The book begins with Antara’s realisation that her mother is losing her mind to Alzheimer’s. With her loss of memory comes a relinquishing of accountability, and Antara confides frustratedly that she has ‘no way to baste her in guilt’. As her mother’s grip of the past fades, so too does Antara’s - memory is a collective exercise, and the retelling of childhood too easily becomes a well-trodden battleground between mother and daughter. In the midst of one argument, Antara ‘for a moment think[s] she is mouthing my words as I say them. Have we said these exact sentences to each other before?’ Remembrance can be a child’s way of enacting revenge, and rebalancing the powerlessness of youth. Antara revisits her mother’s abuses, all the worse for its lack of intentionality. Her mother, in her self-absorption and selfishness, never planned to hurt her daughter - she just didn’t care enough not to. This is a beautiful portrayal of ugly people and the cruelties inseparable from love, a book from which you come away with a bit of grit on you. #

I hate not finishing any book, and it feels particularly awkward not to do so when I have had the opportunity to read a review copy. So I have spent a couple of weeks trying to fall in love with Burnt Sugar. But unfortunately I just can't get in to it.

The story is full of promise - the exploration of a daughter's relationship with her aging, perhaps dying, mother, and how that relationship impacts on the daughter's connections with other family members past and present. The narrative structure is fairly fluid - one really gets the sense of being in the daughter's head as thoughts come and go - some about the practicalities of the present; others about how she ended up with the life she has now.

But for some reason I just could not click with this one. Please don't let this put anyone else off - try it for yourself. I am not criticising the book - it's just that it was not for me. Hey, we can't all like everything, can we?

With thanks to the publisher, Penguin Random House UK, for a review copy via NetGalley

I liked but didn’t love this novel. The difficult mother daughter relationship that it follows held my interest, and I finished reading quite quickly, but I also didn’t particularly like or relate to either the daughter, who narrates the novel in first person, or her mother. I also felt that some of the personality traits of the narrator (her artistic focus on drawing rather than painting, her sexual encounters with her female friend, for example) are flagged as important without being properly explained or interrogated.