The First House

‘I married my husband to live in a fairy tale … We would be like planets orbiting the sun or gods enacting their myths. Marriage was a solution, and I wanted to be dissolved.’

A woman’s husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage – or so she believed. In the days that follow, marooned with two young daughters in a suburb that has never quite felt like home, she begins coming apart.

As she sifts through the ruins of the life she had shared with her husband, she begins to notice the warning signs she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into the forest of her own mind, where marital memories intermingle with myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses, messages hidden in the constellations and altars stained with blood. Over the course of a single summer, as two broods of cicadas prepare to emerge at once and fill the air with a plague of ecstatic transformation, she too is splitting, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae towards the light.

In The First House, Avni Doshi has written a stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic novel about the self that survives when a marriage does not – and the long, necessary labour of breaking open into something new.