Audiobooks by Avni Doshi

The First House: From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar

"Brought to you by Penguin. From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth – for readers of Katie Kitamura, Deborah Levy, Gwendoline Riley and Elena Ferrante ‘I married my husband to live in a fairy tale. I imagined us like planets orbiting the sun or gods enacting their myths. Marriage was a solution and I wanted to be dissolved.’ A woman’s husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her that he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage, an almost perfect marriage. In the following days, marooned with two young daughters in a hostile suburb, the woman starts coming apart. As she sifts through the ruins of their shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into the forest of her own mind, where marital memories intermingle with myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses, messages hidden in the constellations, glimpses of a natural world seething and alive with portents. Over the course of a single summer, as the cicadas that have been buried in the ground for seventeen years prepare to emerge and fill the air with a plague of ecstatic transformation, the woman too is splitting, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light. This is a novel about unhappy families – about poison seeping through the domestic space, the bloody battlefield of the home, the enduring threat posed by those closest to us. Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, it is a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth. © Avni Doshi 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Avni Doshi (Author), Avni Doshi (Narrator)

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[Portuguese] - Açúcar queimado

"Antara nunca escondeu o ressentimento que nutre pela mãe, que abandonou o marido para morar em uma comunidade mística e chegou a viver na rua, deixando a filha sempre à própria sorte. Agora que a mãe começa a sofrer de demência e ter episódios de esquecimento, Antara se vê diante da indesejada responsabilidade de cuidar de quem jamais cuidou dela. É nesse momento que ela refaz a trajetória das suas lembranças para contar a história de duas mulheres unidas por uma relação dolorosa, mas impossível de abandonar."

Avni Doshi (Author), Maria Manuela (Narrator)

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Safed Libaas Wali Ladki (Girl in White Cotton)

"SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020, AND PUBLISHED IN THE UK AS BURNT SUGAR Utterly compelling, complex, unflinching realism - sometimes emotionally wrenching but also cathartic, written with poignancy and memorability. - The Booker Prize Judges 2020 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, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love Taut and unsettling, a dark, ferocious novel. - Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways Antara has never understood her mother Tara's decisions - walking out on her marriage to follow a guru, living on the streets like a beggar, shacking up with an unknown artist, rebelling against society's expectations ... But when Tara starts losing her memory, Antara searches for a way to make peace with their shared past, a past that haunts them both. As she relives her childhood in Pune in the eighties, the time she spent at a Catholic boarding school in the hills of Maharashtra, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, Antara comes up against her own fears and neuroses, realizing she might not be so different from Tara after all. Safed Libaas Wali Ladki, the Hindi translation of Girl in White Cotton, is a journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth. Tracing the fragile line between familial devotion and deception, Avni Doshi's mesmerizing first novel will surprise and unsettle you."

Avni Doshi, Shuchita Mital (Author), Richa Sayal (Narrator)

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Burnt Sugar: The Booker Prize-shortlisted novel

"SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020: A searing, compulsively readable story of mothers and daughters, memory and madness, love and betrayal PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY the Guardian, Economist, Spectator and more... 'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times 'Utterly compelling, unflinching, written with poignancy and memorability' The Booker Prize Judges 2020 In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her arranged marriage to join an ashram, took a hapless artist for a lover, rebelled against every social expectation of a good Indian woman - all with her young child in tow. Years on, she is an old woman with a fading memory, 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 mother who never seemed to care for her. This is a poisoned love story. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar gradually untangles the knot of memory and myth that bind two women together, revealing the truth that lies beneath. 'An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence' Guardian 'A corrosive, compulsive debut' Daily Telegraph (*****) 'Scouringly brilliant, a blazing debut with words that glitter sharp as shards of broken mirror' Buro."

Avni Doshi (Author), Vineeta Rishi (Narrator)

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