Sohaila Kapur reviews Avni Doshi’s First House and Andaleeb Wajid’s Have You Met Me, exploring women’s identity, marriage, memory, intergenerational trauma, and the transformative power of selfhood across contemporary fiction through intimate emotionally resonant storytelling.

I read two interesting novels this week. Both written by women, from a woman’s perspective. Both talk about the dependence of women on their men in the absence of their own identities and their rude awakening, as late bloomers. Both describe the pain and trauma this awakening can cause, to themselves and their families, but which ultimately enables them to express their power as individuals. One is an internal journey, the other an external one, inspired by an internal one.

First House: Identity Unravelled

First House (Harper Collins, 2026) is Avni Doshi’s second novel, after Burnt Sugar, which won many prizes, especially as a first novel, and was also longlisted for the Booker Prize. This novel has been described as ‘raw’, ‘naked’, ‘brutal’, ‘eerie’, ‘surreal’, ‘dreamy’, and ‘strange’ by her peers as well as established British newspapers like The Guardian.

It deals with a rather mundane subject: the unravelling of a marriage and a woman. What gives it mystery and poignancy is its simple but powerfully evocative prose that veers towards magical realism. It is sharp, cynical, poetic, and expressive of the emotions internalised by the protagonist, an immigrant to the US. The statue of a naked Diana erected in her neighbour’s garden works as a symbol of the protagonist’s own sexuality and her failure to express it. She comes across as neurotic, reacting to her circumstances and environment in a quietly hysterical way.

Nobody survives her razor-sharp analysis; not her parents, her elder sister, and especially not her husband, who is in and out of the house at random. That’s how the protagonist sees him: random, selfish, unsentimental. But through her castigation, a glimmer of his own predicament winks through. A husband who was rarely understood by his emotionally unstable wife. And who finally broke free to rebuild his life, on his own terms.

It’s interesting when the protagonist notes how she was never allowed to live on her terms; either as a daughter, a wife, or a mother… with constant demands on her time, life, and psyche, hinting that this was a problem perhaps with most, if not all, women; what Geetanjali Shree, the Booker Prize-winning author, calls ‘a timeless tale of all women’. Women were best off not knowing, ruminates the author; the unknowingness giving them security and protection from the outside world. Even if it meant turning a blind eye to the husband’s philandering. After all, what did a woman (she herself) really want? A home and a routine life, so what if it implied confinement?

Poetic sentences from the book:

“Life could be a painting, where motion is applied through brushstrokes, but essentially everything remains static… a moment captured. Routines performed daily, the repetition making us eternal, hieroglyphs in stone.”

Or, “We wanted to be safe at any cost, in exchange for any sacrifice, yearning for a container that would not shatter.”

But the humiliation seeps deep into the mind, which ultimately starts living a horrible fantasy. In the deterioration of their parents’ marriage, the protagonist’s daughters also see their mother’s sanity unspooling. The author’s main characters are unnamed, giving them an archetypal quality.

The characters are one-dimensional, almost like cardboard characters, something another critic pointed out. We know nothing about their past, their psyche, or their motivations. But when dealing with a psychological novel in the first person, that detail becomes irrelevant. Here we are witnessing the inner workings of a depressed woman on the verge of psychosis and not the unravelling of a story. Time too is no longer linear.

The book juggles ritual, spiritualism, and astrology to create the protagonist’s inner world. The title of the book is named after the astrological house which deals with identity, something she is searching for. The other strong symbolism is cicadas, whose emergence she is awaiting at the beginning of the book…. their metamorphosis, brief, frenzied life, and death. What will her own metamorphosis bring her? Life or….? The end poses more questions than answers.

Have You Met Me: A Family Awakening

Have You Met Me (Harper Collins, 2026), by Andaleeb Wajid, is a family story, a coming-of-age fiction involving four teenagers who discover the secret journals of their dead grandmother, upending family relationships. Strangely, the story resembles the play that I wrote and staged in 2023–24, titled Kuch Life Jaisa, which was also the story of a mother whose children discover her diary and secrets at her funeral, bringing about a huge transformation in outlook and relationships within the family.

The writer of this book is the author of the horror graphic novel Scare Walk and has written 50 novels of different genres in the past 16 years. One of her Young Adult novels was adapted for Amazon Prime as Dil Dosti & Dilemma.

The novel is from the perspective of four young cousins who gather after years at the funeral of their grandmother (Nani). The cousins played together as kids, but two of the families settled at opposite ends of the world. They got busy with a different culture and lifestyle, although at home the parents tried to maintain the culture they were born and raised in. The result is a confusion in the minds of the kids, as is the case with immigrant children. The three sisters have had a bittersweet bond, and their present interactions are laced with endearments and sarcasm. Old rivalries persist in middle age too.

So when the families gather for the grandmother’s funeral, some of those differences flare up; not just between the sisters but their husbands and children too. But this is essentially the grandchildren’s story and the transformation brought about through the discovery of their Nani’s journals and the secrets they contain. What could have been the final breaking point of the extended family’s tenuous relations actually strengthens the bonds, as the children turn an apparently negative situation into a positive one. The family is united and the Nani’s secret legacy is brought to light, giving her the recognition she never got in her life and didn’t seek either, for fear of social ostracism.

The novel also throws light on traditional, middle-class Muslim society and women’s place in it. Starting off as devoted and obedient wives, the women eventually rebel in their quiet way, with the instigation of their kids. The cousins themselves learn to circumvent the straitjacket that they see swiftly descending on them. So Nani’s life, as told in her journal, turns out to be a liberating force for her daughters and their children. The title is actually a reference to the grandmother nobody fully understood. Have You Met Me is a story of familial love that moves effortlessly through three generations, with a wonderful message at the end.

The power of the book lies in its story and not the prose, which is simple and direct, without any poetic flourish. The chapter headings are the names of the cousins whose perspective it is, and tend to be repetitive. The novel becomes immersive when Nani’s journals are discovered. The beginning of the novel, which introduces the characters and their relationships, tends to drag a bit. But these are little quibbles.

Overall, as established children’s author Shabnam Minwalla wrote, “the novel beautifully explores the sometimes combative and sometimes tender bonds that hold three generations of a family together.”