India, Oct. 10 -- A divorce can reinforce all kinds of emotional faultlines. The end of a marriage, or any meaningful relationship, can lay bare all the wounds that came before: the parents, the siblings, the inner child. Avni Doshi's new novel, The First House, is the autopsy of a marriage that has fallen apart, and therefore of the self. The unnamed narrator is unnervingly familiar: millennial, wife, mother to two small girls, writer who is not really writing, financially dependent, deeply self-aware and therefore distraught and overwhelmed by helplessness and feeling everything too much, too viscerally.

The novel opens with the protagonist's husband telling her their marriage of 13 years is over. She reaches for her neck and finds tha...