Wow. This book is captivating in that it is unflinchingly honest. The narrator is us and sometimes that narrator is unlikeable - that is not always easy to read.

I found the novel initially interesting but ultimately not compelling enough to finish, after two attempts. I would however be interested in looking at future titles from this author. Thank you to NetGalley for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a masterpiece and unbelivably good for being a first novel. One of the best books in 2020. 

I talk about it in this video on my Booktube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYbieb3sSJU

Thanks for getting the copy.

A strong-headed and often selfish mother and divorcee—Tara—slowly being bogged down in dementia; a visual artist and former's daughter—Antara—who worries about her career, her marriage, and the tension-filled strings weaved in the relationship with her mother who is gradually losing her memory; a narration spilled through dual timelines—one painting the current events against the backdrop of a modern Indian city, and the other recounting years marking Antara's childhood. 

Like sugar that's caramelizing, this shortlisted title for Booker Prize 2020 is dangerously scalding while it entangles a mother-daughter relationship in unmet expectations, lost dreams, unhappiness, and years of neglecting sensitivity, love, and passion that every fulfilling relationship demands. And like caramelized sugar searing on the flames, Burnt Sugar can scorch with painful evocativeness around abuse, loneliness, and post-partum depression wrapped in the flawed characterization of a woman. 

Despite the very many invigorating and individualistic themes with potential to manifest empathy, understanding, and relatability, and equally important depictions of timely tensions like classism and religious strain, this debut fails to let a reader indulge in the absolutely realistic mess due to the lack of a compelling voice, an excessively floundering narration, and unnecessarily cliched portrayal of disturbing instances, nauseating descriptions, and the typically gross, pathetic, and filthy rendering of India—not to say there aren't issues in the country or stray dogs or pervert gurus, but the way Burnt Sugar paints the picture of this third-world country is wildly acclimatizing to the western audience and so-called intellectuals with awards to give.

Artist Antara has just been married when her mother Tara shows first signs of Alzheimer’s disease. With her mother losing her memory gradually, the daughter starts to remember what they both went through. The time when her father still lived with them, then, the time at an ashram where kids where more or less left to themselves while Tara was deeply in love with a guru, her time at a Christian, yet not so very philanthropic and humane, boarding school. As an adult, Antara learns that there are rules she is not aware of but which are highly important to others e.g. for her mother-in-law and which she better adhered to. 

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

Avni Doshi’s debut novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, the first draft was written during a stay India and won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize, all in all, it took her seven years to complete the book. The relationship between mother and daughter always remains the main focus of Antara’s thinking and her art since she is under a constant emotional pressure. Even though it is highly toxic, she cannot – of course – get rid of it. 

The author’s observation and especially the way she describes the mother’s gradual memory loss are particularly striking. The contrast between tradition and a modern way of life, obviously present everywhere in India, is also powerfully depicted. 

Having heard so much praise of the novel I really was looking forward to read it, yet, I struggled with the negativity. The relationship between mother and daughter, the mother’s neglect of her small child, the injustice Antara experiences again and again – it is not easy to endure. Maybe it just wasn’t the best time to read it – 2020 has offered by far enough negative news and after months of pandemic, who doesn’t slowly become depressed?

Burnt Sugar is one of my favourite books of the year and I find myself lost over Avni Doshi’s beautiful, gloomy prose over and over again. Doshi writes about dementia so accurately and reproachfully —it is not making amends with the demented but making amends with the fact that you will never get what you wish for. In an interview with Five Dials, Doshi says: 

‘We have an expectation that loss comes all at once. You lose the person physically, mentally. There’s a void when a person has gone. My experience with dementia is that because the mind is going piece by piece, you’re left with this body that looks perfectly healthy. It’s able to do all the things it always did. The person looks the same except they’re not there and there’s something almost uncanny about the experience because you feel you’re in front of a wax figure: beautifully preserved, smiling, almost eternal, but vacant. In a sense, it’s a death without the lost of the body.’

Burnt Sugar is most likely to be a controversial read, especially if you are an Indian woman. You will either love it or hate it. 

Doshi narrates the story of a mother and daughter, Tara and Antara, through the lense of what identity, freedom and motherhood can mean to two different women from two different generations. The energy between the pair is nerve wracking. They cut each other down with hurtful words without regret but at the same time, there is also an incredible sense of duty and matrilineal affiliation as Antara realises her mother is losing her memory. 

As the reader, I loved all the micro aggression and tensions because it’s not everyday you come across an Indian book where mothers and daughters call each other names, sleep with the same man and turn others on each other. You have to give kudos to Doshi for freeing these women up to be their true selves which in this case happens to be freedom seeking and egotistical over maternal and domesticated. 

One of the big plus points of this book is Doshi’s use of language. She has a way with English which is incredibly exciting because it feels so powerful and angry, a huge contrast to the more mellow constructions that have emerged from the country.

What I was a little less satisfied was with the author sometimes being too obvious. Did she literally have to call the daughter, Antara to undo what Tara stands for? Similarly, towards the end the mother holding on to her son-in-law in a possessive manner to reinstate her power to seduce and control, feels titilating but then you realise we are falling back on the trope of the seductive woman and that woman can be your mother for a bit of a shock value. 

I will end with the recurrent motif of forgetting Antara- in the ashram and in old age because by doing so the mother refuses to let the child take over her complete objective reality. She refuses to be defined by the joys of motherhood and that’s a bold position to take in contemporary India. I really, really enjoyed this counter narrative.

#bookstagram #bookbookbook #burntsugar #indianwriter #booker #bibliophile #readwithsas

Beautiful, brutal and bristling with emotion, this book is ready to break your heart time and time again. A real tale of the faults of the human condition, it really is a powerful read.

This searing novel about mother-daughter relationships, and growing up (even as an adult) is a messy, haphazard but powerful narrative about how our relationships define, and sometimes scar us.

Our narrator is a married adult woman, living in India, whose mother seems to be developing signs of dementia. Over the course of the novel we get an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative which ranges around the narrator, Antara's, relationship with her mother, her art, and her relationship with her husband. We often flash back to her childhood, seeing the course of events that have brought us to where we are now. Antara's mother is long divorced from her husband, who was absent from Antara's childhood, and during her daughter's youth lived in an 'ashram' and even at one point on the streets. Antara is bounced from place to place throughout her childhood, therefore it is no surprised that she feels unsettled, and fears abandonment even as an adult. 

Antara isn't a likeable character - she can be highly frustrating, makes poor decisions and almost self sabotaging at many points. However, while we might not like her, she is interesting because we can relate to her on so many levels. She captures so much of the experience of being a woman, capturing complexities around her body, her relationship with food and eating, including what it means to take up space, her sexuality, her identity as a woman, artist, wife and daughter. We might not always agree with Antara but we can definitely recognise at least some, if not a lot of what she feels. 

Doshi captures how relationships between mothers and daughters can be strained, painful, dysfunctional and even highly toxic. There are elements of this book which are incredibly difficult to read, but important to explore. Equally, the explorations around memories and forgetting, and the questioning of whether this is real without the medical symptoms present is fascinating. Doshi fits a lot in to this novel, and I'm sure you could reread this several times and find new layers and new meanings each time. 

This book will likely be a bit of a marmite read - despite it's brilliance on many levels, it is not the most accessible of narratives. However, this makes it perfect for the Booker shortlist where it is sure to get the attention it deserves. Whether or not you like the style of this novel, there is no arguing with the fact that this is an incredible debut.

Confession Time:-
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Prior to The Booker Prize Long list 2020 announcement I had not heard of this book. Then like magic it started popping up everywhere on the old book gram to rave reviews.
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My review is going to be no different.
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This book is going to make you feel uncomfortable, uneasy in parts but I feel at times  when a book can do that then you get that feeling that your in for a very interesting ride.
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It sets both the tone & atmosphere for what lies ahead and the relationship between Mother and daughter.
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The bond between mother and daughter is unbreakable or so they say. But here we have a relationship that appears to be beyond repair or help.
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Dementia is slowly robbing Tara of her life, personality both past and present. Yet for her daughter the past is ever present in her mind and will just not leave.
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Tara has no recollection that she was an uncaring mother. She believes that it isn’t true.
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I found this book interesting and as I have already said uncomfortable in places. As it takes on mental health and the subjects that surround it. Also the damage that can occur if you haven’t had the beat childhood and how you form as an adult.
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I can see how it was shortlisted as it is a good read.
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Didn’t love this, I just couldn’t find an element I was drawn too, complicated mother daughter dynamics are interesting, and I don’t need my characters likeable but I just couldn’t get involved, I am of the minority though and know many have enjoyed this quirky and twisted little story.

There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. 

Antara’s mother, Tara, has dementia; she wanders around at night, asks Antara to phone people who are dead, and eventually doesn’t recognise Antara at all. They have a complex, antagonist relationship. When Antara was small, her mother left her husband, Antara’s father, because she felt stifled in his parents’ home, and joined an ashram. Run by a guru who promoted free love and took some of the women as his lovers before casting them off, Antara was neglected by her mother, instead becoming close to a woman called Kali Mata. Now, Antara seems to want a conventional life; she’s married and has discussed the possibility of children with her husband. However, she works as an artist; her most recent project being one in which she copied the face of a man over and over again.

The damage Antara’s mother rendered has left Antara in a position where she both loves and hates her mother. She wants to take care of her as she deteriorates, while also wanting to hurt her. It’s deliberately unclear whether some of Antara’s actions are because she wants the thing she is pursuing or because she knows it will hurt her mother; perhaps that she’s her mother’s daughter makes any distinction impossible. 

The epigraph to the book is a quotation from Lidia Yuknavitch’s superb memoir The Chronology of Water. Yuknavitch is one my favourite writers so I figured I was in for a treat as soon as I opened Burnt Sugar and I was right. Doshi’s depiction of Tara and Antara’s relationship shows how complex, interdependent and toxic the mother/daughter dynamic can be. There are few good portrayals of this type of motherhood in literature; it’s refreshing to see another excellent one.

All reading is subjective and some readers may report entirely different experiences from mine, but I enjoyed this book. 
If you put into the mix that it is a debut novel, albeit one worked on over the course of eight years, you can only be understanding of certain shortcomings, for instance some similitudes which really jarred with the general accomplished style. 

Though the theme of parental neglect is very far from my experience, I found the characters very relatable. I also found the author's ability to give you a sense of place really very good and of a 360 degrees scope, through all senses. I really enjoyed the frequent sensorial exploration of the environment, particularly in the culinary realm, which really helped me immerse myself into the story. 

"It is a struggle to remain present wherever I am, because my mind travels in time and space, not just to past and future but also to the homes that surround us in this compound, to the bodies that inhabit this city."

Many thanks to Hamish Hamilton and NetGalley for sending me a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The narrator is an unreliable one, but her memories are nonetheless her memories and some of them really stayed with me, particularly what she reports as her first memory in the ashram. I thought the conflicted relationship with her mother was well developed and both characters were interesting. Based on interviews with the writer it would seem that the genesis for the book was a reflection on the particular cusp which a lot of women find themselves, between having being a daughter (more or less well cared for) and a mother (more or less well caring) and soon possibly to become a carer for the mother who cared for us - again with varying degrees of competence. 
This theme is given added depth by the particularities of the narrative and the offshoot themes which are not as explored, but if you like are another elaboration of the conflictual mother-daughter relationship placed on a larger scale, such as Indian society vs. Non-Resident Indian (NRI) society and East vs. West (the ashram and the Westerners flocking to it).

"He said this is something that will always separate us - Americans don't behave in certain ways. I asked him not to idealize the polite veneer of his childhood because everyone knows what Americans are really capable of."

This book isn’t a big and loud story it’s a quiet story about the tumultuous relationship between a mother-daughter, and our main character Antara who has to look after her mother after finding about her dementia diagnoses. Antara has never felt loved since she was a child so having to love her mother is a hard task for her as their relationship just wasn’t happy at all. And we see that through the flashbacks we get from when Antara was really young. 

It’s a very dark book but it’s one I think a lot of people really enjoy.

No surprise this is on the booker list, it’s a rare one whereby you are reading and you are swept along with the story not knowing where you would end up.
Along the roads of India and into various parts of the main characters life. She try’s to understand her mother’s illness and make everyone else believe it. 
A very deep story fully of questions, descriptive passages and lots of love.

Such an interesting book! I really enjoyed this, picked it up on recommendation of the Booker prize reviewers and I wasn't disappointed. The writing is incredible, it really makes you think. I'd definitely recommend this if you're looking for a character-focused story that's brilliantly written and will give you allllll the feels. Amazing work, all the stars from me!

Thank you for early sight of Burnt Sugar. It was nothing at all like what I expected! I have left full reviews on Waterstones and Amazon, and have posted about it on Instagram and Twitter.

Although the quality of the style, the poignancy of the mother-daughter relationship and the interesting insights into Indian society and culture are undeniable, I have to admit I found reading Burnt Sugar a rather unpleasant experience overall. The bitterness and the cynicism of the narration were just too much to take, and made it a depressive read. Saying that, I did finish the book while thinking constantly that I wanted to stop, so something pushed me to go on. It is a disturbing novel which is not devoid of qualities, but it was too disturbing for me.

"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.