Description

‘Vivid and vigorous, precise and unsparingly truthful . . . Excellent’ Financial Times

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

‘Unsparing, exhilarating. This novel boils with brutal insight. Avni Doshi is among the finest prose stylists at work today’ Katie Kitamura

‘Lush and sharpened to a dagger point… I was consumed by this novel’ Amina Cain

‘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.

Publisher Review

Vivid and vigorous, precise and unsparingly truthful . . . Once again Avni Doshi gives us a woman on the edge and a dreadful sense of the horror that lies, not entirely dormant, in the domestic * Financial Times * Dense and alert, distinct and dreamlike, Avni Doshi takes a single intimate relationship (husband-wife) and excavates it… Its core experience [is] that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from wifehood… As I read [The First House] I had a sense that something was gradually building, or being dismantled * Guardian * Unerring, unsentimental, unflinchingly honest * Daily Mail * Taut and deliberate, punctuated by flashes of unsettling clarity . . . Doshi excels at rendering the interior life in all its contradictions, allowing tenderness and irritation, longing and resentment, to coexist without resolution . . . She is particularly deft at capturing this sense of disorientation, where grief does not present itself cleanly but seeps into the everyday * The New York Times Style Magazine * A deliciously readable study of domestic rupture * i Paper, ‘The best new books to read in July 2026’ * A hypnotic novel about the breakdown of a marriage when a woman’s husband walks into the bedroom one evening and asks for a divorce. Over the course of a summer, we witness her life fall apart and then reshape with a hopeful sense of freedom * Elle, Summer Stories * The First House dissects the tyranny of family with surgical precision, unsparing in its depiction of the delusions of marriage and motherhood – the novel boils with brutal insight. Avni Doshi is among the finest prose stylists at work today; every page is exhilarating — Katie Kitamura, author of ‘Audition’ Nuanced, visceral, daring * RED * Whereas Doshi’s Booker-shortlisted debut, Burnt Sugar, portrayed a mother-daughter relationship in caustic detail, she adopts a dreamier, more reflective mood in The First House – but still with scalpel in hand . . . The prose is flush with strange, unsettling descriptions . . . Doshi shines in her ability to conjure the agitated atmosphere of the home . . . shot through with poignant symbolism, The First House is a novel about where we turn when things fall apart * Literary Review * A sharp, surreal investigation into the details and delusions of being a person-a wife, a mother, a daughter-that promises to leave you somewhere completely different from where it picked you up * Lit Hub, ‘Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026’ *