Indian literary fiction has been having a great year. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, Meena Kandasamy’s Fieldwork as a Sex Object and Karan Mahajan’s The Complex have been the talk of bookstagrammers and must-read lists the world over. The newest (and most highly anticipated) book to join this group is Avni Doshi’s latest release, The First House. This one comes six years after her debut, Burnt Sugar, blasted through all the bestseller lists to hit the Booker Prize shortlist in 2020, portraying “the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter”, as the blurb reads. If her first novel picked apart the mother-daughter bond, Doshi’s second novel zeroes in on another relationship—a marriage, followed by a separation, and its aftermath.
So, what’s so special about The First House?
“When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My head is missing.” This line captures the crux of the story perfectly. Our unnamed protagonist’s husband wants a divorce, and she is unable to process the structure of her life in his absence. She is codependent on the level that she doesn’t have a working credit card or any access to her finances, or even a car to get herself around in her town in suburban America. (It’s also something Belle Burden stresses in her controversial memoir, Strangers.) Doshi’s lead, though, has an Indian family—an interfering set of parents and a superior-sounding unmarried sister who lives with their parents, and two daughters, one of whom is only obsessed with having a phone. Through myth, nature, and astrology, there is the one realisation that our sheltered protagonist needs to arrive at: that through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, we are eventually all alone.
Why should I pick it up?
If Belle Burden’s non-fiction bestseller Strangers met Rachel Cusk’s introspective Outline and had a literary-fiction baby, The First House would be it. In this novel, though, Doshi is brutally honest with her protagonist—she is not written to be liked or even sympathised with; she is very much real. She’s a writer who barely gets time to write, dabbles in astrology in her free time (that’s where the title of the novel comes from), lives through a problematic family dynamic, and is basically in a fugue state when her husband leaves her. This is no novel with a lightbulb epiphany at the end, nor is it one of complete resolution. Instead, it’s a women’s journey, an attempt at honesty, laying bare her life, foibles, and the hollow truths she believed about her life.
About the author
Avni Doshi is a New Jersey-born author whose debut novel, Burnt Sugar, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020, longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2021, and won the Sushila Devi Award 2021. The First House is her second book. Both her novels focus on the internal lives, hopes, and fears of women. Doshi’s writing has also appeared in publications like British Vogue, Granta, and the Sunday Times.
The First House by Avni Doshi is published by Harper Collins India and available at all local bookstores; ₹359
