For Alice and Hanna,saint and sinner,growing up is a trial. There is their mother,who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing,and their father,who takes an absent one. There is also their older brother Michael,whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.
There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of,but which has shaped everything. As adults,Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions,and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended.
They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship,and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down.
And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.
From the author of the Waterstones Book of the Month Our Fathers comes a compelling domestic comedy about complex family dynamics,mental health and the intricacies of sibling relationships.
Publisher: Quercus PublishingISBN: 9781529420463Number of pages: 400Weight: 280 gDimensions: 196 x 126 x 34 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'SO brilliant. A brutally funny and whip-smart novel about dysfunctional families,with some of the best fictional sibling relationships I've ever read. It'll easily be one of my Books of the Year.'- Hannah Beckerman
'I didn't want it to end. Completely absorbing and brilliant and funny and painful.'- Charlotte Duckworth
'Toxic mothers,absent fathers,angry sisters and enraging brothers - this sharp,wise comedy explores difficult family dynamics,from all-too-relatable emotional patterns to the inexplicable agonies of mental illness; yet it's also one of the funniest novels you'll read this year.'- The Guardian
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