Sisters
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award-Winning Author: A second wife is haunted by the first in a novel that "expertly deploys revelations like land mines" (The Minneapolis Star Tribune).
From the acclaimed author of I Married You for Happiness, Sisters is a "masterpiece" (The Boston Globe) that gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies of a new marriage sprung from betrayal.
Lily Tuck's unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise, in a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With her signature clipped and measured prose, National Book Award winner Tuck's new novel is elegant, raw, and powerful. As does I Married You for Happiness, this novel also largely takes place inside the mind and memory of a narrator. Fixated on her husband's first wife, referred to as "she" throughout, the narrator spends most of the book imagining what the first wife was like in her youth or what she's like now as a refined, middle-aged pianist. Though the two women have rarely met, the narrator focuses on the specific intimacy of their sharing, albeit in succession, the same man. Though at first she benignly estimates the number of times the husband and first wife would have made love, over time, her perseveration becomes more consuming, teetering on the verge of obsession. Both women live in upper Manhattan, and the narrator sometimes goes across town, to the large grocery store she imagines, correctly, to be where the ex-wife does her food shopping, and waits in the aisles. The husband himself is largely out of the picture, traveling for work, yet his absence grows more noticeable as this succinct book builds in emotional intensity to a shocking ending. Though compact enough to be read in one sitting, it's also magnificent enough to be reread and savored.
