2020/028: Sisters -- Daisy Johnson

I am drunk. Yes. I think then, as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars – and she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world. I remember the promise we made years ago, how we’d written it down so we wouldn’t forget... [loc. 724]

UK Publication Date now 13th August 2020, delayed from early July ... thanks to NetGalley for a free review copy in exchange for this honest review.

September and July, both around sixteen years old, are inseparable. They were born ten months apart and have been codependent ever since. Their mother Sheela, a British-Indian writer and illustrator, whose popular childrens' books are based on her daughters, feels excluded by their bond. September is the dominant one, the one who invents games ('September says lie in the road when the lights are red'), the one who demands that July shares her birthday, the one who withholds love as a form of punishment: the one whose anger makes her mother nervous. When July, the younger and less assertive of the sisters, falls prey to vicious school bullying, September seeks vengeance, with terrible consequences.

Sheela decides they need to leave Oxford and seek shelter in the house where September was born. The Settle House is an isolated place on the Yorkshire coast, intermittently let to holidaymakers by the sisters' aunt Ursa (sister of their dead father Peter), and broken into from time to time by the locals. The house is as much a character, a presence, as any of the humans who live there. There are secret passages in the walls; lightbulbs don't last; the house is full of noises, and there is a sense of busy-ness, 'a creasing in the air like the moment just after a train has passed'.

This is a claustrophobic and occasionally terrifying novel, quite different to Johnson's earlier Everything Under but sharing a sense of ominous forces just beyond the edges of perception. I reread for this review, and even knowing what was coming the lines 'this is not what happened' were thoroughly chilling, and the final few pages are harrowing. 'My sister is a black hole my sister is a bricked-up window my sister is a house on fire my sister is a car crash my sister is a long night my sister is a battle my sister is here.' [loc 1531]. That's where the horror lies, not on the beach in the dark, not in the old bird-watching hide, not in the overheated house with Sheela shutting herself away upstairs. While the 'twist', which I shan't explain or explore, may be predictable, its outcome is not.

I suspect Daisy Johnson will be an auto-buy for me in future: like Tana French, whose fiction has similarities of ambience, she combines the mundane and the strange, in excellent prose and without explication.