My Christmas gifts included not only last year’s Booker Prize winner (The Promise), but also two of the titles shortlisted. I’ll get around to The Fortune Men in due course, but I was especially intrigued by Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, not least because it’s unusual to see a debut novel make it to the shortlist of such a prestigious award. I started the novel with high hopes (it has a terrific opening line – “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”), but I tired of it quite quickly. Yet another novel about troubled mother-daughter relationships and the unreliability of memory? Enough already. It didn’t help that I found the whiny, self-obsessed narrator obnoxious. Avni Doshi is clearly very talented, but Burnt Sugar should have been a novella at most.