{"product_id":"the-first-house","title":"The First House","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.\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eAuthor: Doshi, Avni,author\u003cbr\u003eContributors: Doshi, Avni,author\u003cbr\u003eBinding: hardcover\u003cbr\u003ePublication Date: \u003cbr\u003eRelease Date: \u003cbr\u003eLanguages: English,Published,English,Original Language\u003cbr\u003ePublished\/Release Date: 16 Jul 2026\u003cbr\u003eBic Classification: Modern \u0026amp; contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Fiction: special features\u003cbr\u003ebicCode: \u003cbr\u003eFormat: Hardback\u003cbr\u003ePublisher\/Studio\/Brand: Penguin Books Ltd\u003cbr\u003eAuthor\/Director\/Artist: Avni Doshi\u003cbr\u003eDimension (cm): 225x144x24 mm\u003cbr\u003ePackage Dimension (cm): 27x222x144 mm\u003cbr\u003eItem Weight (g): 0\u003cbr\u003ePackage Weight (g): 350","brand":"Hamish Hamilton","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53368601051433,"sku":"BK0241819083","price":80.14,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0734\/5868\/0105\/files\/91HoBBeCz7L.jpg?v=1785485423","url":"https:\/\/www.centloop.com\/products\/the-first-house","provider":"Centloop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}