Guardian Review

Burnt Sugar is an extraordinary confection. Avni Doshi's debut novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker prize and is an elegantly written family story that sizzles with hatred and is impossible to put down. Sleek and contemporary, it is set in the Indian city of Pune and narrated by an artist, Antara, who watches and crows while her mother's dominating personality gives way to dementia and decline. From the very first line - "I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure" - the novel is a fearless and scathing notching-up of cruelties, betrayals, hurts and abuses. There is a generational accretion of horror that gives the novel a towering, mythic quality. Antara's memories of her mother move on to her memories of her father, then memories of her parents' parents, then observations about her own marriage. The home, wedlock and the family are not a source of comfort for any one of the characters, but sites of disturbance and peculiar revulsion. "My mother recounted the strangeness of her early married life to me on several occasions. Her mother-in-law ate pickled Kashmiri garlic every day¿ The house had the particular smell of digested allium." Crisply written, Burnt Sugar is a thrilling ride into hell, where ordinary scenes have a nightmarish quality, as when Antara comes in to find her mother surrounded by "glittering shards of a glass of water¿ catching light on the floor, while she sits like a witch, mesmerised by a small fire in a wastepaper bin". Each setting, whether it be the ashram/cult that Antara's mother fled to as a young woman, a hospital, a school or even a dinner party with wealthy friends, is an opportunity for people to withhold love and care from each other. When Antara's mother declines in health, her grandmother says with mock pity: "She's become so fat, your mother. Her knuckles are swollen to double what they were. How will we pry the jewellery off her hands when she dies?" In every interaction, the one thing the protagonist expects - and receives - is humiliating rejection. This is not a miserable book, though, but a painfully exhilarating one. Misery is inert and deadening; this novel is alive with pain, fear and insults. The contemporary scenes of Antara's life are shot through with satire as Doshi skewers the affectations of the entitled and privileged and mocks the sheer hard work of marriage. There is a brilliant scene in which, working out with her husband at the gym, Antara quotes a women's magazine article about relationships: "I don't think you're being generous and compassionate," she says. He replies, puzzled: "I didn't say anything." The couple have dinner with a friend whose family own shopping malls across India; the friend "introduces himself, with a story of his background, his family and their estimable wealth. He sets the scene for how he wants to be judged and remembered, clinking a large cube of ice in his glass at the end of every sentence." The triumph of Burnt Sugar is that, despite its scathing attack - the sheer bitterness and despoilment indicated by its apt UK title (the original Indian title was Girl in White Cotton) - it retains throughout a stylistic freshness. This is an exquisitely written novel at a formal level, highly observant and patterned with fresh details, where even sashimi at a Japanese restaurant "lies on the plate like a submissive tongue". So come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath.