Who They Was (Booker Longlist 2020)

Description

A searing debut novel about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal – for fans of Jenny Offill’s Weather, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk and Diana Evans’ Ordinary People

‘Taut, unsettling, ferocious’ Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways

‘Acerbic, full of wit and cool intelligence – every sentence is a coiled spring and each psychological portrait burns itself into the mind. I couldn’t put it down’ Olivia Sudjic, author of Exposure and Sympathy

‘Crystalline, surgical, compulsively readable. An examination of toxic relationships and the ties that bind us’ Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

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.

‘Daring and deliciously dark, Burnt Sugar will keep you gripped until the very last sentence’ Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past is a Foreign Country

‘Raw, wise and cuttingly funny on love and cruelty, marriage and motherhood, art and illness, and one woman’s fight for her sense of self’ Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days