Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

A searing debut novel about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal - for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy and Diana Evans

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery cords of memory and myth that bind two women together, and hold them apart.

— 'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times

— 'A corrosive, compulsive debut' Daily Telegraph (five stars)

— 'Scouringly brilliant, a blazing debut with words that glitter sharp as shards of broken mirror' Buro.

— 'Utterly compelling, complex, unflinching realism, written with poignancy and memorability' The Booker Prize Judges 2020

— 'An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence' Guardian