Consent
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3.9 • 10 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A smart, mysterious and heartbreaking novel centred on two sets of sisters whose lives are braided together when tragedy changes them forever. From the award-winning author of The Golden Mean.
Saskia and Jenny are twins who are alike only in appearance. Saskia is a hard-working grad student whose interests are solely academic, while Jenny, an interior designer, is glamourous, thrill-seeking, capricious and narcissistic. Still, when Jenny is severely injured in an accident, Saskia puts her life on hold to be with her sister.
Sara and Mattie are sisters with a difficult relationship. Mattie, the younger sister, is affectionate, curious and intellectually disabled. As soon as Sara is able, she leaves home, in pursuit of a life of the mind and the body: she loves nothing more than fine wines, sensual perfumes, and expensive clothing. But when their mother dies, Sara inherits the duty of caring for her sister. Arriving at the house one day, she finds out that Mattie has married Robert, her wealthy mother's handyman. Though Mattie seems happy, Sara cannot let this go, forcing the annulment of the marriage and the banishment of Robert. With him out of the picture, though, she has no choice but to become her sister's keeper, sacrificing her own happiness and Mattie's too. When Robert turns up again, another tragedy happens. The waves from these events eventually engulf Sara and Saskia, sisters in mourning, in a quest for revenge.
Consent is a startling, moving, thought-provoking novel on the complexities of familial duty and on how love can become entangled with guilt, resentment and regret.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Sisters can share an incredible connection. But the same bond that strengthens can sometimes strangle. Sara is a fiercely independent academic who’s also the caregiver for her intellectually challenged sister, Mattie. Saskia is an ambitious grad student who rushes to her reckless twin sister Jenny’s side after a serious accident. Both sets of siblings are engulfed in their own compelling dramas until one person sets them on converging paths—a man with a creepy penchant for vulnerable women like Mattie and Jenny. Part compulsively readable thriller, part multilayered drama, this pageturner explores just how far the “responsible” sisters will go to set things right, whether Jenny or Mattie (ahem) consent to the plan or not. Darting through plot twists and thought-provoking moral questions at the same blistering pace, author Annabel Lyon lands at a shocking conclusion we were mulling over for days.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lives of two pairs of sisters from Vancouver intersect in Lyon's intense, intimate novel of love, grief, and murder (after The Sweet Girl). After 30-something Sara Landow's mother dies in 2011, Sara assumes responsibility for her intellectually disabled younger sister, Mattie. A month later, when Sara returns from a short trip, Mattie has married their late mother's handyman, Robert Dwyer. While Mattie had never been declared legally incompetent, Sara doubts she is capable of consenting to marriage, and tries to have it annulled. In 2015, the lives of 27-year-old twins Saskia and Jenny Gilbert are derailed when a car accident leaves Jenny in a coma. While Jenny is still unconscious in the hospital, a man is caught masturbating in her room. As Saskia, disturbed by the news, learns about Jenny's practice of BDSM, Lyon alternates back to Sara as she grieves in the aftermath of Mattie's death from a fall for which Robert was present, a few years after they married. When Sara and Saskia eventually meet, they process their sisters' disturbing relationships. While the circumstances leading to the women's connection are not entirely surprising, their reactions ramp up the novel toward a deliciously dark conclusion. Lyon's mesmerizing novel perfectly captures the odd mix of love and resentment faced by caregivers.
