‘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.

"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

"Unerring, unsentimental, unflinchingly honest" - Daily Mail

"Nuanced, visceral, daring" - RED

"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)

"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: MENA