In Conversation: On Burnt Sugar: A Novel & The Archer

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body. Her work has been published by The Paris Review and McSweeney’s, and anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut novel, The Archer (Algonquin Books), is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist, navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and immersive story about the transformative power of art and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya one day peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak. This dazzling, centuries-old dance form requires the utmost discipline and focus. Soon, pursuing artistic transcendence through kathak becomes the organizing principle of her life. And as an uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother. BookPage noted that it “blends the corporeal and the spiritual in a story about what it means to be a woman and an artist. Swamy’s writing is transportive, precise and almost hypnotic. [Her] perceptive and observant eye misses nothing.”

Born in Shanghai and based in San Francisco, Meng Jin is the author of Little Gods: A Novel (Custom House). Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Masters Review, Baltimore Review, and Bare Life Review, as well as in the anthologies Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and Best American Short Stories. Her next book, Self-Portrait with Ghost (Custom House), is a collection of short fiction stories and will be published in summer 2022.

Working as an art writer and curator in India, New Jersey-born Avni Doshi began writing fiction. It was a good decision, one that led to a Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and a Charles Pick Fellowship. In her debut book Burnt Sugar: A Novel (The Overlook Press) – shortlisted for the TATA Literature Award upon its publication in India and in the United States for the 2020 Booker Prize – we meet Antara, who characterizes her relationship with Tara thusly: “I would be lying if I say my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” Wild and reckless in her youth, Tara abandoned her marriage to join an ashram, and while she was busy as a partner to its spiritual leader, little Antara was cared for by an older devotee. She also embarked on a stint as a beggar and spent years chasing a homeless artist, all with young Antara in tow. But now Tara is forgetting things and Antara is an adult who must search for a way to make peace with the past, as she confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. Burnt Sugar is a story of love and betrayal between a mother and a daughter, and an exploration of the subjective nature of truth. The Washington Post called it “a work of extraordinary insight, courage, and sophistication.”