September 13th, 2019

Hamish Hamilton scoops Avni Doshi's sharp betrayal novel 'Burnt Sugar'

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Hamish Hamilton have acquired Avni Doshi’s debut novel Burnt Sugar (titled Girl in White Cotton in India): a searing debut novel about obsession, betrayal and the ties that bind.

Out now in India with Fourth Estate/HarperCollins India, titled Girl in White Cotton, the novel will be reaching even more English-speaking readers worldwide with Hamish Hamilton as Burnt Sugar in July 2020.

Hermione Thompson at Hamish Hamilton says: ‘From the brutal first sentence, Avni’s writing held me fast on its gleaming hook. Disquieting and surgically precise, Burnt Sugar is a nuanced indictment (or possibly a painful acquittal) of the human heart, in all its ambivalence and multiplicity.

 

 

 

In her youth, Tara 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. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar is a novel about mothers and daughters, memory and self-mythology, but most of all it is a story of betrayal.

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The novel has already been making a splash in the press, with Vogue India adding it to their list of must-reads by first-time Indian authors, and Bazaar India featuring the book in their most-anticipated list. Burnt Sugar has also been hailing great reviews:

“A compulsively readable examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind and stifle us. Avni Doshi is a polished, lyrical talent who has invoked a furious fever dream written with crystalline, almost surgical precision.” Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

A courageously engaging novel written in spare, gleaming sentences. It made me hold my breath and gather it up again.” Tishani Doshi

 

For more information, please contact Maria Cardona.