In-Store: Avni Doshi: The First House w/ Elizabeth Winkler

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card. Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A book signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/MIP63nXO3B0
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From the Booker Prize finalist author of Burnt Sugar comes a riveting and lyrical novel of rupture and rebirth, of one woman’s journey to understand the fault lines in her marriage, her home, and her family.

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.

A husband announces he is leaving, that he was never happy. A woman is left behind with their two children in the house they built together, reeling at this forced recasting of the story of their marriage. Everything becomes strange: an encounter at the grocery store, a looming cicada horde, a statue of Diana that suddenly appears in her neighbor’s yard. Or was it always there?

As she wades through the aftermath of her marriage, her complicated family resurfaces. Although close to her parents, her relationship with them is strained, and she is fully estranged from her older sister—the perfect daughter—who still lives at home and always disapproved of her husband. So when did the trouble begin? And where will she go from here?

When she was a child, an astrologer in India told her parents that the family would die in water. Ever since, they’ve avoided pools and lakes and the ocean; no one ever learned to swim. From the Booker finalist and beloved author of the “viscerally poetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Burnt Sugar comes a brilliant story of betrayal, renunciation, and renewal, of a woman spiraling who swims to the other side and comes up for air.

Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey and lives in Dubai. She has a BA in art history from Barnard College in New York and a master’s in history of art from University College London. Her writing has appeared in British Vogue, Granta, and The Sunday Times (London). Her first novel, Burnt Sugar, was originally released in India under the title Girl in White Cotton, where it won the Sushila Devi Award. Upon publication in the UK, Burnt Sugar became a finalist for the Booker Prize. It was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize, became a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year, and was named a Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Economist, The Spectator, and NPR. Burnt Sugar has been published in twenty-six languages.

Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist, among other publications, and has been anthologized in The Best American Essays. Her first book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (Simon & Schuster, 2023), was called "a fascinating detective story… whose irreverence is part of its appeal" by The Guardian, and praised as "extraordinarily brilliant" and "pleasurably naughty" by André Aciman. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master's in English literature from Stanford University.