About two years ago I was on a long roadtrip with my family across New Zealand, a trip that I still sometimes dream about, watching that landscape roll out before me, the gorse along the ravines and the morning we woke cradled in the mountains and couldn’t see beyond the mist. But the image that is most burned into my memory from that trip is located in the back of our campervan, where my younger sister was doing her best to piss me off, and succeeding. I put my headphones in and ignored her and then watched as she sighed, subsided in her seat, looked bored all about her, and then saw my youngest sister, sitting innocently waiting to be bullied. Ulli’s face lit up, pleasure and malice. Siblings will save you & ruin you every time: here are some stories featuring the best ones, just in time for the holiday season.
Owing an intro debt to New Zealand, it feels fair to start with Kiwi superstar Margaret Mahy’s weirdest and most thrilling book, THE TRICKSTERS. The Hamilton family are having a southern hemisphere Christmas at their beach house — Christobel, Serena, Benny and Harry, our heroine — with all the weird dynamics and rivalries you would demand. But the real sibling heroes of the story are the three haunted-or-haunting brothers who ship up out of the blue: Ovid, Hadfield, and Felix. They cannot be trusted. They smile very easily. They always have an answer. Like any good ghost story, this is a very romantic one. Did you know you slow light down, Felix tells Harry: “Light leaves the sun travelling at one hundred and eighty six miles a second. That means it tears along for ninety-three million miles through space – then reaches you and hesitates.” Harry asks how far that is in kilometres. A girl after my own heart, a horror story in the sun.
(buy @ readings)When my wife and I first met she lent me her then-favourite book of all time (I am duty bound to report it may have been replaced by Der Zauberberg), Miriam Toews’ A COMPLICATED KINDNESS, a short novel in which not much happens, about a teenage girl called Nomi living in a Mennonite community in Canada. This book should be treated carefully; if read at the wrong time, it has the potential to throw you into an existential crisis. Nomi lives alone with her dad. Her mother and sister, Tash, are both missing, and they’re on every page of the book like a hangover. Reading about Tash feels like getting a crush, in that older-sister-worship kind of way. Every now and then you get a glimpse at what it was like when they were together, and it’s always hilarious and awful. For some reason, when we were in the library, Tash and I often pretended that we were German spies and we called ourselves Platzy and Strassy. We'd hide bits of information in books and then give each other clues about how to find them. There are probably still little notes stuck in Billy Graham books that say things like: I was brutally tortured for several hours this afternoon but I am fine. Let's meet for drinks at the Uber-Swank at eight. Platzy.
(buy @ indiebound)Oyinkan Braithwaite’s MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER was everywhere last year and for good reason. This is a slim, pleasant nightmare of a book whose overwhelming emotion is annoyance: isn’t it enough to already have a hot older sister, and live in her shadow, without having to bury all her bodies for her, too? Braithwaite blends loyalty and admiration with fury and jealousy in a way that is immediately recognisable; at one point, the sister of the title is in a hospital bed showing off for Snapchat and I couldn’t remember if that was something that I had done to piss off my sister or she had done to piss off me. (Closer investigation revealed both of us.) Take it in your pocket for a day of public transport, as I did, and read it in gulps: its tiny chapters are perfect for when you want to escape and enjoy a moment of pure mayhem.
(buy @ indiebound)Oops, New Zealand continues to be a theme — in Ngaio Marsh’s superlative mid-century detective novel SURFEIT OF LAMPREYS, Roberta leaves New Zealand after the death of her parents to stay with the giddy, loving, decrepitly aristocratic Lamprey family in London. Their rich uncle, who has just turned down a desperate request for money from the Lamprey patriarch, is promptly murdered. The Lampreys are one of those immediately excellent literary families who require only a few lines to be charming, then take several chapters to acquire their sinisterness. Roughly halfway through the novel, “as clearly as if, instead of sitting stone-still in their chairs, the Lampreys had made a swift concerted movement, Alleyn heard them close their ranks”, which is chilling. The neat, optimistic ending is a bit of a letdown, but there’s too many good moments in here to mind: the twins’ bald-faced lies, the semi-adopted sibling who turns out to be just-not-adopted-enough to allow for a good love story, a very excellent small boy who will not be stopped from saving everyone. And can someone please explain to me what on earth is going on with Frid?!
(buy any number of great older editions on ebay)Vigdis Hjorth is somewhat of a Norwegian literary superstar, a bestseller and prize-winner and the instigator of a national debate on virkelighetslitteratur (“reality literature”), but WILL AND TESTAMENT is only the second of her books to be published in English translation. This is a shame, but maybe also a mercy. It’s a punch to the gut, a circling evocation of trauma that replicates its own symptoms in the text, and I’m not sure I could read another Hjorth novel this year. This is a story about family abuse, and if the parents are the Big Bad and the father’s death the catalyst for the novel, the siblings are what got to me most: a deeply private, intimate relationship that has rotted and twisted and gone wrong. The narrator of this book needs allies, and she does not have enough. She can’t quite hate her siblings for what they’ve done, but I hate them for her.
(buy direct from Verso Books)ALSO READ: Archer’s Goon, my favourite of Diana Wynne Jones’ excellent families, with two sets of siblings and a small girl called Awful to boot; “101” from May-Lan Tan’s collection Things To Make And Break, a story more sibling-adjacent than sibling-defined, but grimly (and… dare I say it… sexily) caged by family ties; T.H. White’s The Queen of Air and Darkness, which introduces the four sons of Morgause & King Lot from Arthurian legend, who address each other as “my heroes” and fuck each other up; Julia Armfield’s short story “Formally Feral”, for an excellent pair of inter-species siblings and the line “My father said a town was only as interesting as its bad apples and only as safe as its lunatics”; Patricia A. McKillip’s Winter Rose, which leans right into that 90s fantasy love of purple prose but is a fun read in any case; I left the Glass Family out as too obvious to mention, but just in case you haven’t read Franny and Zooey you better scurry over to that quick, and follow it up with my personal favourite, Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters.
REALISTICALLY SPEAKING: Expect a sequel to this month’s theme at some point in the future. There are too many good books about siblings and I haven’t even reread Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love since I was sixteen.
SAVE SOME CHRISTMAS SHOPPING FOR NEXT MONTH: Your ultimate book buying guide is a-coming.