-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
With Sisters, Lily Tuck delivers a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession; charting with elegance and insight love in all its phases.
Lily Tuck's critically-lauded, bestselling I Married You for Happiness was hailed by the Boston Globe as "an artfully crafted still life of one couple's marriage." In her singular new novel Sisters, Tuck gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal.
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.
"Starred Review. Though compact enough to be read in one sitting, it's also magnificent enough to be reread and savored." - Publishers Weekly
"Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts but ultimately a novel that prioritizes the virtuoso skill of its narration at the cost of a hastily staged conclusion." - Kirkus
"[Tuck's] latest book, a contemporary novel, is a stunningly compact series of images of a woman's obsession with her husband's former wife, rendered in chapters only a paragraph or at most a page in length." - Booklist
This information about Sisters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lily Tuck was born in Paris and lived in Thailand in the early '60s. She is the author of two previous novels: Interviewing Matisse, Or the Woman Died Standing Up and The Woman Who Walked on Water. She has written numerous short stories, the most recent of which have been published in The New Yorker, Fiction, and The Antioch Review.
If you liked Sisters, try these:
by Ann Packer
Published 2026
The bestselling, beloved author returns with her first novel in over a decade, an intimate and profoundly moving look at a long marriage and the ways in which a startling request can change a couple's understanding of who they are, together and apart.
by Ann Napolitano
Published 2024
From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes a poignant and engrossing family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?
by Michelle Hart
Published 2023
A novel about a young woman's life-altering affair with a much older, married woman.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
