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About the Author
Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey. She received her BA in art history from Barnard College and her MA in history of art at University College, London. While working as an art writer and curator in India, Doshi began writing fiction. She has been awarded the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and a Charles Pick Fellowship. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the prestigious TATA Literature Award upon its publication in India. Avni Doshi currently lives in Dubai with her family.
Praise For…
“Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist. She knows the difference between a line and shade — both start the same way, but intention and style inform their difference. Doshi’s sentences are sharply drawn and devastatingly precise. There is never a wasted word, no debris, no flourish to hide behind. A voice this unadorned, and blunt, is so hauntingly stubborn and original, you want to hear from it again and again.” — New York Times Book Review
“Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.” — The Washington Post
“I read Burnt Sugar with awe, fury and compassion, electrified by the question of whether time does heal all wounds, and whether it even should." — Catherine Whelan
“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
“Burnt Sugar is absolutely exquisite.” — Diksha Basu
“Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence, but also brilliantly poetic and passionate—every sentence is a coiled spring.” — Olivia Sudjic
“Avni Doshi writes fearlessly, with a cruel, almost terrifying intelligence. I was discomfited and exhilarated by it.” — Meng Jin
“A courageous novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.” — Tishani Doshi
“Raw, wise, and cuttingly funny.” — Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
“Burnt Sugar is an unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humor from the very first sentence.” — Guardian
“Doshi’s prose is arresting and her ideas fiercely intelligent.” — Sunday Times
“Doshi’s visceral debut is a no-holds-barred excavation of how hate can both poison and sustain.” — Daily Mail
“An intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting, Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, skeptical, and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.” — Guardian, Book of the Day
“Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.”
— Publishers Weekly STARRED review
“a landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath ... Dark emotions color a daughter’s complex connection to her mother in a striking first novel that delves deep into family bonds.” — Kirkus STARRED review
“The words in Avni Doshi’s “Burnt Sugar” hit you like a bullet... Regardless of your cultural background, “Burnt Sugar” will pulse with an addictive and thrilling energy. Every sentence is a treasure to read and brings you one step closer to yourself, even though you didn’t ask for it.” — Michigan Daily
“Burnt Sugar is an incredible novel with messages and characters that remain with its reader far beyond the final line.” — New York Journal of Books
“With a tightly controlled narrative voice and careful use of flashbacks … This is a layered, descriptive, at times distasteful novel that brings us face to face with our own darker impulses and deep-seated traumas.” — Chicago Review of Books
“‘Burnt Sugar’ is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication…It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.”
— Washington Post
“Impressively assured…It’s the mother’s selfishness and instability that makes Antara such a complex character, hypersensitive, anxious and filled with rage.”
