Contact Clock Question Basket Search User Store Facebook Mail Instagram Twitter

The First House

by Avni Doshi

  

€ 21.25 

ISBN: 9780241819081

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.

240 pages.

Not Yet Published.

Printed on or after 16/07/26. Please note dispatch may take 5-10 days after publication date.
A separate order should be placed for this item. If you order this along with other items, your entire order will be held and despatched when complete.

Date of Publication: 16/07/2026

Cover of The First House - Avni Doshi - 9780241819081Hardback

The First House also appears in these Categories:

Hardback Fiction