SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020 A searing debut novel about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal - for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy and Diana Evans 'Utterly compelling, complex, unflinching realism, written with poignancy and ...

We had a great discussion about Burnt Sugar despite the fact that no one really liked the book that much. We all agreed that it defied our expectations. The twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel that reveals that the narrator Antara is much less trustworthy than we thought was compelling, and a lot of us were impressed with how Doshi made such a surprisingly dark novel. Doshi is also a talented writer and did a good job describing everything from Antara's art to growing dementia to the tension of mother-daughter relationships. We had a lot of theories about the book. It was clear that Antara's mother Tara was a terrible person who did not perceive the world correctly, but we weren't sure what that meant for Antara. Was Antara replicating Tara's life with her own bad love affairs and desire to leave her domestic life? Was Antara just a bad person who couldn't stop oscillating between caring about people and hurting them to protect herself? All of these were questions that were interesting for us to unpack. We also found Doshi's take on memory similarly complex and interesting. The novel clearly states (in the voice of a doctor reviewing Tara's mother) that memory is constructed and constantly revised. How were we to understand this unreliability? GIven the general darkness of the book, it seemed to be negative -- everyone reconstructed memories in ways that elided over suffering or ignored facts. But is that why Antara cares about her mother's memory -- to have a record of her suffering at her mother's hands? Or is the book about Antara's own disintegration as she more and more steps outside of these relationships? There was so much fodder to work with from Antara's surrogate mother at the ashraam and Antara's eventual rejection of her to Antara's postpartum depression and bad relationship with her mother-in-law (replicating her mother's bad marriage) to Antara's sexual relationship years later with her mother's last lover, Reza. All of this was good content, but the problem with the novel is that all of this complexity and dark development left us nowhere to connect with the characters. Some of the elements just failed to work. No one believed that Tara's family would have allowed them to be homeless in the same city, so the family's history didn't make sense. Antara's husband Dilip is the least developed character in the novel, but is that because Doshi drew him so thinly or because Antara couldn't conceive him correctly? It seemed to use that Doshi left everything in the novel so unreliable and troubled that we never had an invitation to sympathize with a character or root for them. Scenes which could have created empathy, such as Antara's abandonment at the ashraam by her mother, failed to do so. Ultimately, we just couldn't find a way into the novel, and so while it was very interesting to analyze, we didn't really enjoy reading it. Doshi has certainly created a complex story with lots of facets to explore, but she doesn't ever give you the pull you need to really commit to the journey.