Sisters: A Novel

Product Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR“[A] skillfully crafted gothic mystery . . . Johnson pulls off a great feat in this book.” —Financial Times “It reminded me, in its general refusal to play nice, of early Ian McEwan.” —The New York Times Book Review “Johnson crafts an aching thriller about the dangers of loving too intensely.” —Time 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 shortlisted 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.
Review
Praise for Sisters by Daisy Johnson: ONE OF THE TOP TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR —PUBLISHER’S WEEKLYONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR —VULTURE
“[A] skillfully crafted gothic mystery . . . Johnson pulls off a great feat in this book.” —
Financial Times
“It reminded me, in its general refusal to play nice, of early Ian McEwan.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Johnson crafts an aching thriller about the dangers of loving too intensely.” —
Time
“The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud. . . .
Sisters is an ode to sisterly love—and a warning of how destructive devotion can be.” —
The Economist “
Sisters ends with a magnificent twist, one that will make readers want to start over from page one and see what was right in front of them the whole time.” —
The Boston Globe
“As well as the stale, cluttered bedrooms of
The Virgin Suicides, it has echoes of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the rusty, moss-coated grange in Tennyson’s “Mariana,” the “spiteful” haunted house in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, and, inevitably, the bleak landscapes and inseparable, feral childhoods of
Wuthering Heights.” —
New Statesman (London)
“Entrancing . . . Johnson’s own writing summons the just-off-ness of the uncanny; she is capable of passages of exquisite creepiness. . . . Her sentences have an aqueous quality.” —
The New Yorker
“Transcends genres of horror and true crime . . . The creepiest thing I’ve read lately. . . . a thoroughly modern, highly disturbing shocker that is also beautifully written.” —
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Read this when you are able to stay up late.
Sisters is a haunting story. . . . We didn’t see the twist coming. This story is a tight monster.” —
Goop
“The ending will blow your socks off with a twist I never saw coming.” —
Good Housekeeping
“Johnson expertly layers the Gothic atmosphere with dread.”
—The New York Times