THE FIRST HOUSE

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

‘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.

PRAISE

“Like Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, Avni Doshi's The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a daggerlike 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, by its movement towards consciousness and great clarity.”  — Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

“The First House reads like something out of mythology. In Avni Doshi's hands, everything becomes laced with a surreal and sinister magic. In measured and clever prose, the narrator unspools all of her relationships, and she knows exactly which loose threads to pull. Her quiet observations about the inner machinations of a family are honest, insightful, spot-on. This is a writer who understands best what tethers us to those we love.” – Katie Yee, author of Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar