The First House
- Author: Avni Doshi (United States)
- Book type: American novel
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
- To be released: July 16, 2026
- Length: 368 pages
- Format: hardback / ebook
- Prize: £ 16.99 / £ 9.99 / £ 14.00
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Avni Doshi The First House reviews and information
Whenever a review of The First House, the second novel by Avni Doshi, the American author, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “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)
- “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)
- “Bracing, unsentimental, and beautifully written. The end days of a marriage are the beginning of a new life. In this story of rebirth, each page is sharp, piercing, and totally defiant of the expected.” (Douglas Stuart, author)
Blurb of the second Avni Doshi novel
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.
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.