Sisters

The electrifying new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under 'Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King' OBSERVER 'Exhilarating ... Masterful' EVENING STANDARD 'A book less likely to chew you up than screw you up' THE TIMES 'A tour-de-force' GUARDIAN 'A gothic masterpiece. You can't stop reading' i NEWS Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September. Desperate for a fresh start, their mother Sheela moves them across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible, dreams are endless. In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September - forged with a blood promise when they were children - is beginning to change in ways she cannot understand. Taut, transfixing and profoundly moving, Sisters explodes with the fury and joy of adolescence. It is a story of sibling love and sibling envy that fans of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King will devour. 'Daisy Johnson is one of the best writers in this country ... an astonishing stylist. Sisters is a thumping good book, haunting, visceral and potent.' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 'This is a book that makes you remember why you first fell in love with reading. I was haunted by it.' Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock 'A blistering read. An exquisitely rendered exploration of sibling love and rivalry that rattles the core.' Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch 'I LOVE THIS BOOK! Explosive, dark, weird and utterly compelling... There are few writers as talented as Daisy Johnson.' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

About the Author :
Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.

Review :
A short, sharp explosion of a gothic thriller whose tension ratchets up and up to an ending of extraordinary lyricism and virtuosity. A haunting, emotionally acute novel with a terrific twist. [A] gothic masterpiece... You can't stop reading... This taut, lyrical firecracker of a book crescendos into an emotional ambush of a climax, which...confirms Johnson as a profoundly inventive and masterful storyteller. A tour-de-force... Johnson's prose seduces us with the promise of comfort and then yanks that comfort away. Exhilarating... A masterful follow up to her debut, Johnson's novel is quietly terrifying and certainly an apt read for 2020. Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King... Readers will find many pieces of treasure buried here... Terrifically well-crafted, psychologically complex and chillingly twisted. A second novel that should see [Johnson] consolidate her grip on power... A book less likely to chew you up than screw you up. A short, sharp shock of a book... Johnson's lyrical prose and knack for conjuring unsettling moments makes for an impressive read. Sisters will, I suspect, be a big hit. The creeping, physical menace that made Johnson's debut so memorable commands this book, too... It makes an immediate impression -- there's a weight to it which doesn't shift when you put it down. A dark, slippery, psychological, gothic horror tale...with a rhythmic, visceral energy. 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, her second novel, is a gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale. [Johnson] can pace a narrative as scarily and surprisingly as any airport thriller-writer; she can also write like an angel, evoking sights and smells, changes in the weather, the landscape inside your head... I guarantee that once you start this novella, the world will be dead to you until it is finished. And when it is finished, the world will have changed. Daisy Johnson's extraordinary second novel, Sisters, a short, sharp virtuoso tale of literary horror with a stop-you-in-your-tracks ending that casts the entire novel in a different light. An uncanny, Gothic tale... Deeply unnerving and unnervingly prescient. Johnson uses words like some artists use paint, saturating her sentences with images and sensations in ways that lend a delirious, sensorial quality to her writing, yet which can also have an enervating impact on the actual plot. But just when you wonder where this hallucinatory novel is going, Johnson beautifully wrong-foots you with a shivery denouement that makes the ghosts in her story all too real.