New Delhi, Aug. 8 -- With Burnt Sugar, which was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2020, Avni Doshi proved her prowess with her sharp writing and smirking wit. In her latest novel, The First House, she returns to the theme of families, their disrepair and disintegration, with her trenchant sentences and unusual insight. While her debut unspooled a mother-daughter relationship, she now pivots to a wife and husband. But she does more than that as she shows how relationships bleed into one another, how the families and values we grow up with colour the adults we become.

Reading The First House is a disorienting experience, as it moves between this world and the surreal, plunges into myths, wades into astrology, obsesses over Diana (the Ro...