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The First House
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241819081
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $45.00

The First House

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From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth

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 a shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into her own mind, where marital scenes intermingle with the old myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses. Over the course of a single summer, she is splitting like an insect in its chrysalis, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light.

Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, this is a novel about unhappy families – about the bloody battlefield of the home and the enduring threat posed by those closest to us.
  • Published: 20 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241819081
  • Imprint: Hamish Hamilton
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $45.00
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Praise for The First House

The First House reads like something out of mythology - clever, insightful, laced with a surreal and sinister magic. And the narrator knows exactly which loose threads to pull. Avni Doshi is a writer who understands what tethers us to those we love

Katie Yee, author of 'Maggie'

Like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, The First House is at times brutal and harrowing, with sentences and scenes sharpened to a dagger point. But it is also lush, filled with symbols and signs and a kind of freedom that comes only through falling apart. I was consumed by this novel

Amina Cain, author of 'Indelicacy'

Bracing, unsentimental, and beautifully written. The end days of a marriage are the beginning of a new life. In this story of rebirth, each page is sharp, piercing, and totally defiant of the expected.

Douglas Stuart, author of 'Shuggie Bain'

Precise, sharp, engrossing -- an account of the end of a marriage [that] will surprise the reader. A remarkable novel

Deepa Anappara, author of 'The Last of Earth'

A blistering tour-de-force of a novel that will tunnel itself into your ribcage and linger for long afterwards. Surreal, both contemporary and timeless, and uncomfortably all-too-human -- The First House cements Avni Doshi as one of the most original and astute writers working today

Sharlene Teo, author of 'Ponti'

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)

Avni Doshi's beguiling second novel would seem to be about marriage and divorce. But The First House is interested in more than the subject of romantic love (and its end), asking questions about what it is to be a good parent and dutiful child, about family bonds and the role of fate in shaping our lives. It’s a dreamy, off-kilter, and beautiful book that delights in resisting its reader's expectations

Rumaan Alam, author of 'Leave the World Behind'