The First House
3999
The First House
3999
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth 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 a shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into her own mind, where marital scenes intermingle with the old myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses. Over the course of a single summer, she is splitting like an insect in its chrysalis, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light. Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, this is a novel about unhappy families - about the bloody battlefield of the home and the enduring threat posed by those closest to us.
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'
Dense and alert, distinct and dreamlike, Avni Doshi takes a single intimate relationship and excavates it… Its core experience [is] that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from wifehood * Guardian *
Like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a dagger 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 -- Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'
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 *
Reflective, poignant, flush with strange, unsettling descriptions . . . Doshi shines in her ability to conjure the agitated atmosphere of the home . . . Shot through with symbolism, The First House is a novel about where we turn when things fall apart * Literary Review *
Potent, visceral and haunting, a fever-dream interspersed with myths and legends . . . There are many books about divorce. But there are very few good books about the unravelling of a marriage and the disintegration of a mind; this is one of them * The Conversation *
A hypnotic novel about the breakdown of a marriage... Over the course of a summer, we witness her life fall apart and then reshape with a hopeful sense of freedom * Elle, Summer Stories *
Dreamy, eerie, surreal - unerring, unsentimental, unflinchingly honest * Mail on Sunday *
Sharply intelligent, richly allegorical, unsparing psychodrama... An eviscerating study of the quiet violence of domestic discord, and the search for a new freedom * The Bookseller (Editor's Choice) *
Details
ISBN13: 9780241819081
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
Edition:
Publication Date: 20 Oct 2026
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 22.5(H)x14.4(L)x2.4(W)354
Weight (gm): 354
Author Biography
Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey in 1982. Her 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. It was named a Book of the Year by the Guardian, Economist, Spectator, New York Times Book Review and NPR and has been translated into 26 languages. Avni Doshi's writing has appeared in British Vogue, Granta and the Sunday Times. Her second novel will be published in July 2026; it is called The First House.Reviews
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 *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'
Dense and alert, distinct and dreamlike, Avni Doshi takes a single intimate relationship and excavates it… Its core experience [is] that of a woman embroiled in the harrowing process of extracting herself from wifehood * Guardian *
Like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a dagger 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 -- Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'
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 *
Reflective, poignant, flush with strange, unsettling descriptions . . . Doshi shines in her ability to conjure the agitated atmosphere of the home . . . Shot through with symbolism, The First House is a novel about where we turn when things fall apart * Literary Review *
Potent, visceral and haunting, a fever-dream interspersed with myths and legends . . . There are many books about divorce. But there are very few good books about the unravelling of a marriage and the disintegration of a mind; this is one of them * The Conversation *
A hypnotic novel about the breakdown of a marriage... Over the course of a summer, we witness her life fall apart and then reshape with a hopeful sense of freedom * Elle, Summer Stories *
Dreamy, eerie, surreal - unerring, unsentimental, unflinchingly honest * Mail on Sunday *
Sharply intelligent, richly allegorical, unsparing psychodrama... An eviscerating study of the quiet violence of domestic discord, and the search for a new freedom * The Bookseller (Editor's Choice) *