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The First House

Avni Doshi

$39.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
Hamish Hamilton Ltd
21 July 2026
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth

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 a shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into her own mind, where marital scenes intermingle with the old myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses. Over the course of a single summer, she is splitting like an insect in its chrysalis, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light.

Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, this is a novel about unhappy families - about the bloody battlefield of the home and the enduring threat posed by those closest to us.
By:  
Imprint:   Hamish Hamilton Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 222mm,  Width: 138mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   400g
ISBN:   9780241819081
ISBN 10:   0241819083
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982 and is currently based in Dubai. She won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2013 and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in 2014. Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. The novel is published in India as Girl in White Cotton, where it won the Sushila Devi Award 2021.

Reviews for The First House

The First House reads like something out of mythology - clever, insightful, laced with a surreal and sinister magic. And the narrator knows exactly which loose threads to pull. Avni Doshi is a writer who understands what tethers us to those we love -- Katie Yee, author of 'Maggie' Like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a dagger point. But it is also lush, filled with symbols and signs and a kind of freedom that comes only through falling apart. I was consumed by this novel -- Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'


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