Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

This book has been shortlisted for 2020 Booker Prize for astoundingly good reason. Doshi writes a tale that has love, that has hatred and despite family trauma, there is the bond of a family as it attempts to break free of the stories that shaped them all.

Burnt Sugar navigates a mother & daughter relationship that has been harrowing and turbulent. Shaped by the mother’s madness and violence over the years, the daughter must now also navigate her mother’s deteriorating memory. How can she use her anger towards her mother against her if she remembers none of her wrong doings? How does she care for her, while also processing the intensity of emotion around their shared traumas.

A powerful story of how we are shaped by the presence and/or absence of our parents. How the paths that we are dragged along as children mould our complicated adult lives. A story on how we love and create under the weight of these traumas.

Burnt Sugar is exquisitely written. I found myself stopping several times to absorb the beauty of the sentence I had just consumed. I love being surprised and engrossed by a new combination of words on a page, that halts my reading and demands my attention. This is the power of storytelling!

Doshi delivers characters that are complicated, bewildering but also gives the necessary space to empathise with their selfish and perhaps misguided choices. At the heart of each character is the search for freedom and self-expression in a world that rarely allows women the grace to do so.

Stellar read! Have you also read it? Let me know your thoughts.

Rachel x