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Published Aug 2020
224 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
From a Booker Prize finalist and international literary star: a blazing portrait of one darkly riveting sibling relationship, from the inside out.
"One of her generation's most intriguing authors" (Entertainment Weekly), Daisy Johnson is the youngest writer to have been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Now she returns with Sisters, a haunting story about two sisters caught in a powerful emotional web and wrestling to understand where one ends and the other begins.
Born just ten months apart, July and September are thick as thieves, never needing anyone but each other. Now, following a case of school bullying, the teens have moved away with their single mother to a long-abandoned family home near the shore. In their new, isolated life, July finds that the deep bond she has always shared with September is shifting in ways she cannot entirely understand. A creeping sense of dread and unease descends inside the house. Meanwhile, outside, the sisters push boundaries of behavior—until a series of shocking encounters tests the limits of their shared experience, and forces shocking revelations about the girls' past and future.
Written with radically inventive language and imagery by an author whose work has been described as "entrancing" (the New Yorker), "a force of nature" (the New York Times Book Review), and "weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling" (Celeste Ng), Sisters is a one-two punch of wild fury and heartache—a taut, powerful, and deeply moving account of sibling love and what happens when two sisters must face each other's darkest impulses.
"[A] well-crafted, consistently surprising psychological thriller...Readers of classic gothic fiction will find a contemporary master of the craft here." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Johnson...brings her nuanced sense of menace and intimate understanding of the perils of loving too much to this latest entry in her developing canon of dark places where the unspeakable speaks and speaks. A subtle book that brings to bear all its author's prodigious skill. A must-read." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The story is beautifully written, the characters expertly drawn, as is the setting, the house becoming a character in itself. A memorable and haunting novel." - Booklist (starred review)
"[A] dark, atmospheric novel that explores the tension of familial closeness, both physical and emotional, and unfolds in a house in near-isolation...Sisters is one of the rare novels that balances an almost-uncomfortable level of tension with gloriously stylish prose throughout. There's an element of escapism in the profoundly creepy, and the masterful claustrophobia of Sisters will deliver you from your own." – Lit Hub
"Daisy Johnson is the youngest writer ever to have be short-listed for the Booker prize, and with good reason…Exploring the fraught dynamics of blood and betrayal, Sisters is yet another Johnson masterpiece." – Elle, "Most Anticipated Book of Summer 2020"
"Daisy Johnson is an enchantress who can turn the day into night and back again in a sentence. I love her prose so much, and this book was the sibling love-and-horror story of my dreams and nightmares." - Karen Russell, New York Times-bestselling author of Swamplandia!
"Daisy Johnson is a new goddamn swaggering monster of fiction" - Lauren Groff, New York Times- bestselling author of Florida
"This is a book that makes you remember why you first fell in love with reading. I was haunted by it. Utterly unique." - Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds Singing
"Daisy Johnson writes in a torrent of language as unrelenting and turbulent and dark as the river at the book's heart; dive in for just a moment and you'll emerge gasping and haunted." – Celeste Ng, New York Times-bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere
"Surprising, gorgeously written, and profoundly unsettling, [Johnson's work] will sink into your bones and stay there." - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
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.
Daisy Johnson is the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, with her first novel Everything Under in 2018. Her short story collection Fen, received the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in Oxford, England.
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