Sisters
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
*Now a major film SEPTEMBER SAYS*
The electrifying novel from the Booker shortlisted author of Everything Under.
'A short sharp explosion of a gothic thriller' Observer
Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September.
Desperate for a fresh start, they move across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible, dreams are endless.
In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September - forged with a blood promise when they were children - is beginning to change in ways she cannot understand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson (Everything Under) returns with a well-crafted, consistently surprising psychological thriller. September and July are teenage sisters, born 10 months apart. After an incident at their Oxford school, its dark details hinted at as the story unfolds, their mother, Sheela, whisks them away to the dilapidated house where September was born, on the desolate coast of the North York Moors, and holes up in her room, ill-advisedly leaving July at the mercy of her sister. September bullies, intimidates, and cruelly manipulates the passive, compliant July, daring her to perform increasingly dangerous acts in the form of games like "September Says." September taunts a man who comes to set up their internet, and when the girls get online, they seduce men on dating sites and pretend to have entrapped them as part of a police sting. Sheela, meanwhile, writes and illustrates children's picture books, and her deep depression contributes to her neglectful parenting ("I will always love you, she says. And if you need me you come get me. But I need some time," July narrates). The sisters share an eerie, symbiotic relationship; they seem at times to share a single consciousness, and even a single body. In achingly lyrical prose, Johnson employs alternating narratives, divulging and withholding information by turns, keeping the reader unsure of what to believe. When the revelations hit, they are intensely powerful. Readers of classic gothic fiction will find a contemporary master of the craft here.
Customer Reviews
Twisted sisters
Author
British wunderkind. I have not read Ms Johnson's story collection Fens (2016), but the critics raved. Two years later, she was the youngest person ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize, aged 27, for Everything Under. In brief, that involves an odd girl raised by her odd mother on a river boat near Oxford then cast adrift, metaphorically, in her teenage years. She becomes a lexicographer, as you would in Oxford. In her early thirties, she reconnects with Mum and explores language, among other things, with her. Or not. Supposedly, it's loosely based on the story of Oedipus. Very loosely as far as I'm concerned. I only found out about that from a review I read after reading the book. But I digress. I thought Everything Under would win the Booker that year based on Ms Johnson's, let's call it idiosyncratic, way with words. As it turned out, Anna Burns won for Milkman, which was written in the second person: not something you see, or read, every day. That's the Booker prize for you. Anyway, Sisters is Ms Johnson's sophomore novel.
Plot
July and September are the titular sisters, so named because they were born ten months apart (September came first). They live with their Mum Sheela, an author and illustrator of children's books, which often feature her gals, surprise, surprise. Their Dad died some years earlier of natural causes allegedly, although you wonder. After an "incident" at their school at Oxford (we're not told all the details but I got a distinct Mean Girls meets Carrie vibe), they take up a residence in a beachside house on the Yorkshire moors owned by their dead Dad's sister Ursa, as in bear. (Don't ask me WTF that's about. She's not around, so it probably doesn't matter.) The sisters are left to their own devices because their Mum hides in her room most days and only comes out when the girls are asleep, for which I don't blame her in the slightest. The gals, whom I'm tempted to call the monthlies but would never stoop to menstrual appropriation, get up to mischief, especially September who is a budding sadist. Beware the twist in the tale.
This intro sums things up nicely:
"My sister is a black hole.
My sister is a tornado.
My sister is the end of the line my sister is the locked door
my sister is a shot in the dark.
My sister is waiting for me.
My sister is a falling tree.
My sister is a bricked-up window.
My sister is a wishbone my sister is the night train
my sister is the last packet of crisps my sister
is a long lie-in.
My sister is a forest on fire,
My sister is a sinking ship.
My sister is the last house on the street.''
Writing
Ms Johnson is an admirer of Stephen King. It shows. She has a style all her own though, and I mean that in a good way. She uses sentence fragments extremely well and I was impressed by a number of her neologisms, e.g., They live in a "rankled, bentouttashape, dirtyallover" house; their dead father was a "howlingbanderlootinggrifter"; the other girls at school are "judderingwitches, ranksalivafaces."
Bottom line
Celeste Ng, an author I admire greatly (Everything I Ever Told You, Little Fires Everywhere) described this book as "weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling." That goes for me too.