Sisters is the new novel from Daisy Johnson, the Booker shortlisted author of Everything Under. It is an eerily beautiful Gothic novel about family bonds, and in particular the strong sibling connection between sisters September and July. Johnson encapsulates so much in this slim novel; it is a family drama, a coming of age novel, and a steady, quiet Gothic thriller.

There is a secret running under the plot from the very beginning of the novel, when the sisters and their mother Sheela retreat from Oxford to an old, run-down family house in the countryside. We are warned that something is not quite right through references to a significant event in the recent past, and constantly further unsettled by the wild and rugged landscape: the danger and pull of the ocean and the dusty, old country house.

September and July have a strong sisterly bond, that is full of love and sustains them both. But there is something suffocating about the siblings' bond too. Although they are close in age, there is a distinct power dynamic to their relationship, and tinges of jealousy and anger bubble under the surface. The sisters' bond runs deep, powerfully and dangerously driving the novel forward.
There is something so unbelievably captivating about Johnson's writing style. It is beautiful, understated and completely draws you in, but yet is discomforting and unsettling at the same time. The plot constantly threatens to over-spill in unpredictable directions, but Johnson's careful and atmospheric prose reassures you that you are being guided through this novel in the hands of a master.

Sisters opens with a return to an old house owned and rented out by an aunt. The family only seem to go to this house when something is wrong, when they need to retreat from the world and something significant did happen in March, in Oxford. We’re just not sure what.

As the narrative progresses we feel a growing sense of unease. September, the older sister, is manipulative, just like her father had been. He died long ago but he was born in this house and his presence remains, lingering in the sight of his abandoned binoculars.

September is obsessive, protective, violent. It is she who forces her mother to give them one shared birthday, to treat them as twins, though they were born ten months apart. It is September who does the speaking and the deciding for her younger sister, July; she who measures out July’s affections, keeping July to herself, keeping July from her mother.

The house is near a beach. In the middle of nowhere. The internet is slow. Their mother stays in her room, appears only briefly, often late at night. It is easy to visit the beach, to discover other teenagers escaping onto the sand as the days grow longer.

Sisters, while an entirely new story for Daisy Johnson, has a lucid connection to nature and an approach to storytelling that feels very much her own; the narrators – I’m being deliberately illusive – offer us an incomplete picture, keeping facts from us and themselves in ways that encroach upon the reader, chipping away at our trust in them, causing us to guess and grasp at possible interpretations of the unfolding story in ways that keep us tethered to the plot, keen to find out about what happened to these near-twinned sisters, keen to find out what they did.

To say more would certainly spoil the plot, which is gripping, engrossing and grown in a bed of violent, passionate love that tears into relationships, opens the way for depression, anxiety and creativity and leaves a fearful muddle with little room for compassion, calm or contentment. Sisters is a thrilling and expertly-crafted ride. Out this coming August, I’d definitely put it on your wish list.

excellent, short novel by Daisy Johnson, which i found to be much more enjoyable than either of her previous 2 books. There are a couple of pretty gruesome scenes in the book so be warned and it turns out to be all too easy to give away the ending so I will avoid any discussion about that aspect. and recommend it to anyone who likes good storng literary fiction with a hint of the other-worldy to it.

Read in the heat of summer, this book is like a fever dream. It’s easy to get lost in Johnson’s prose and the relationship between September and July. Intriguing and engaging.

Sisters follows the story of July and September. There are, of course, other people in this take but in each others lives these people are mere distractions. It is a relationship that is so intense there is little room for others.

The story surrounds the girls and their mother trying to overcome an incident which happened to them in Oxford, the details of which are revealed to us like a dripping tap throughout the novel

This book is everything I want in a book. Brilliantly written prose, characters that are so life like and well described that you think you can understand how they will act and think, only to then surprise you in a way that is just so life like. I would agree it is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson as the tale is both all encompassing and perfectly sparse. Achingly beautiful and chilling in equal measure, it is a tale that will live on in my heart and my dreams for a very long time.

Dark and dismal, not uplifting or entertaining at all. Not a book to be read if you are feeling low or in need of cheering up at all. Horrible damaged people, from the first chapter you know it’s miserable. I really did not like it, I made myself read it all the way to the finish just to see if there may be a glimmer of lightness.. I did not find any.

‘Sisters’ by Daisy Johnson tells the story of July and September, two sisters who with their mother (Sheena) have moved to the Settle House to get a fresh start. We don’t know why they need a fresh start, beyond that something happened at the tennis courts at school.

Throughout this novel, September and July’s relationship is explored. They are so entwined that they no longer have separate birthdays, but instead July celebrates hers on the same day as Septembers. They play a game called September says, where July is compelled to undertake more and more dangerous challenges. September is presented as strong, dominant and dangerous. July appears unformed, anxious and easily led. Their mother seems absent, either pushed out or unable to look after them. The Settle house as a nightmarish quality, with walls that seem to move, flickering lights and noises in the night.

I enjoyed Johnson’s writing and the way in which the two sisters relationship develops. I was drawn to July, and the way in which she is tricked and bullied by children at school.. I also wanted to know more about Sheena and the girl’s dead and abusive father. However, whilst the end of the novel is clever it is not necessarily satisfying, and at times it was a hard read due to its intensity and the constant sense of uncertainty that Johnson carefully conveyed.

Daisy Johnson is a wonderful writer - her sentences are so perfectly formed that you can enjoy the book on that basis alone. Fortunately, the book is also full of great moments, a rich plot, and terrific characters. Read this now.

Two sisters, born ten-months-apart and with one favouring the mother and the other the father in looks. In every other way they are twins, with September, the bossy elder, demanding the younger July share Birthdays, clothes, a bed, a language, and their every thought. One is feared and the other is ridiculed. But not for much longer…

Sisters was a tale every bit as unsettling and eerie as the cover image. It was a bizarre and twisted story that ensured the reader was forever unaware of what was really occurring and what was a strange fever-dream-blend of reality and nightmare.

My issue with it stemmed from me guessing at the concluding twist early on in the narrative, as it is one I have encountered multiple times before, where sisters form the nexus of the narrative. All novels are, to some extent, an amalgamation of what came before but here, unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to separate this particular novel from its similar ancestors.

I did, however, find this a trippy and disturbing read, especially with the inclusion of Gothic elements, and the open-ended conclusion that appealed to me and suited the unsettling tone that featured throughout.

Daisy Johnson’s Sisters mysterious, wrong-footing novel had me hooked. I loved how Johnson described the dark, grimy intimacy of the sisters’ relationship - love at its most complicated. There is at times an almost gothic feel to the story but the first person teenage narrator always rings true. Their mother takes hold of the story for a part of the novel, and although necessary for clarity, (because at times the dreamlike quality means you’re not quite sure where and when you are), she is definitely a minor player in the psychodrama of sisters July And September’s lives. Gripping and memorable.

Sisters is a beautifully written portrayal of two sisters and their dysfunctional relationship within their family. Johnson manages to write in a way that's lyrical with some exceptional turns of phrase, while still maintaining a story that keeps you turning the pages. The story is unsettling, engaging and makes for an excellent read.

September and July are two inseparable sisters, who have to move to another city with their mother. Sheela, after a horrible accident happens at school. The girls try to cope with life in the house where their deceased father was raised, trying to take care of themselves while their depressed mother needs a bit of time to get over what happened.
This was definitely a page turner! It was a bit spooky, but beautifully written and definitely one that you won't be able to put down!

Daisy Johnson follows her Booker Prize-shortlisted debut novel Everything Under with a short, sharp gothic psychological thriller that echoes Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, while feeling utterly unique.

Two teenage sisters - July and September - are taken to a remote tumbledown house by their fraught mother, escaping a terrible incident that is drip-fed slowly through the pages of the novel. The older September is a whirling dervish of energy, difficult and unrestrained, forcing her younger and meeker sister into increasingly precarious emotional and physical situations. The two are inseparable, and have an almost telepathic connection. As the weeks in the old house drag by, and their mother becomes more and more reclusive, their relationship reaches boiling point - and the house seems to take on a life of its own.

Johnson made a splash with her first collection of short stories - FEN - in 2017. Those stories - often terrifying portraits of women encountering, and being subsumed by, supernatural elements in rural England, feel like a precursor to SISTERS. Her poetic prose tangles around the increasingly dark themes of depression and co-dependence, keeping the reader on their toes as to what is real and what is imagined in the decaying house the three women find themselves hiding in. Past and present merge into one into one in some of the novel's best moments, but Johnson is clear-eyed and unsparing with her plotting and with the characters' journeys.

The examination of three damaged female characters is beautifully drawn - September is a truly terrifying character because she feels so rounded. July, whose eyes we see most of the novel through, is a young woman who has never really known anything other than a sister who controls her every thought, but begins to question whether that is all there is to life. And their mother, who seems to be suffering from depression, has a very humane backstory that unfurls over the course of the novel.

Creepy and strange - I guess the Shirley Jackson comparisons work. Although I knew where this book was heading, I did like it: I loved the prose; it was horribly unsettling and anxiety-inducing. Tight, compelling, fascinating.

- Nirica from Team Champaca

This is an absolutely chilling and brilliant read. The story of sisters July and September and their inconsolable, grieving and damaged mother is both beautifully written and surprisingly painful to read. It is not just a psychological thriller written with real depth and skill, it is also an exploration of family dynamics and the dysfunctional relationship between July and September is almost painfully honest. I have a twin sister who is the opposite of me in many ways and I found it very difficult to read some of this novel. I cannot wait to reopen my School Library again and recommend this book to my student body....it's a very, very good book.

In the acknowledgments section at the end of the book, Daisy Johnson thanks her mother “for watching horror films she doesn’t really want to watch with [her]”. I am not surprised. Sisters is a horror story. Of course, given that Johnson is a Booker-shortlisted author, her latest novel will be admired by many readers who would not generally touch the genre with a barge pole. But make no mistake – it’s horror alright.

Sisters starts with that most Gothic of tropes – the haunted house. Sheela and her two teenage daughters July and September leave Oxford and arrive at a cottage in Yorkshire. The place is “rankled, bentoutashape, dirtyallover”. It’s creepy and unwelcoming (literally so… they cannot find the key supposedly hidden beneath a stone frog and the girls have to jump in through a window). Throughout the novel the house heaves and sighs as if alive, as if its walls and ceilings were pressing upon its new inhabitants. The house also has a habit of hijacking the thoughts of the characters. In one of the novel’s many surreal moments, July sees a bird force itself out of one of the house’s walls. Sheela, the mother, finds parallels between herself and the cottage:

She has always known that houses are bodies and that her body is a house in more ways than most. She had housed those beautiful daughters, hadn’t she, and she had housed depression all through her life like a smaller, weightier child… There are so many noises she cannot sleep. In the night, mostly, thumps and thundering, the sound of many footsteps, the crash of windows opening and closing, the crash of windows opening and closing, sudden explosions which sound like shouting… At times, awoken in the darkness, she things again about how that house is, more than any other, a body.

There are other horror tropes aplenty. For much of the novel, the first person narrator is July. It soon becomes clear that she has an unhealthily close relationship with her sister September, who is just ten months older than she is. They are inseparable in a manner which is at times touching and loving, but more often, than not, disturbing. The disorientating thought processes of July are challenging to follow, but suggest that she is in thrall to September, who has the stronger character of the two and a violent streak to go with it. We also realise that the family is blighted by mental health problems, violence and abuse. There are certain chapters of the novel which are presented in the third person from Sheela’s perspective. The narrative in these segments is clearer, and solves some of the many questions raised by July’s account. However, the mother’s explanations only serve to confirm the past episodes of rage and abuse which still cast a shadow over the family. The feeling of dread and terror is ever present. More importantly, the novel is underpinned by that niggling doubt which often characterises the best Gothic tales – is there any truth to the novel’s apparently supernatural or fantastical elements?

What is brilliant about Sisters is the way in which Johnson combines striking images and poetic language with horror and thriller elements to convey the ramblings of disturbed teenage minds. What is less impressive is the plot and the way it is handled. As the novel progresses, one cannot help suspecting that the author is holding back key details, in order to build up to a Night-Shyamalan-like twist and which does, eventually, arrive (that is why most reviews of the novel are peppered with *spoiler alerts*). Yet, the twist is underwhelming and not really worth the contrivances leading to the final revelation.

So, do read Sisters for the insightful characterizations, the great writing and for its original use of genre tropes. However, if its page-turning plots you're after, there are plenty of psychological thrillers that are probably better at providing thrills and chills.

I have hesitated over whether this reivew, despite the obligation to do so in return for having had access to the book. As someone who thinks that Johnson does have talent, I was keen to see for myself (prior to any publicity roll out) whether the second novel lived up to the the rapturous applause her work has generated. I’m afraid that for me, it simply didn’t.

Sisters is a novel that does generate some degree of atmosphere and has an element of surprise, but neither are carried off with conviction or any real authenticity. That for me is the central problem of this book: it is an exercise in style, rather than a story that fully explores the characters created.

I understand that in part this aloofness from the characters, and from the reader themselves, is the result of withholding information from the reader in service of the twist. But needing to keep something back doesn’t mean the author can’t make the narrator feel like a real person.

The big thing that prevents July ever feeling like a living, breathing teenage girl is down to the style. A style that tends towards confusion and abstraction, leaning on intangible similes, doesn’t help an author create a whole person. I also wonder whether the choice of first person narrative here also adds to this disconnect; the way this character speaks and thinks simply doesn’t sound like the person it’s saying it is. July doesn’t talk how teenagers talk; she talks how an adult woman feels she remembers teenagers talking and thinking. She doesn’t move through a world that is recognisable to those who know or work with teenagers. Having been a teenage girl myself, this novel gestured at some of those experiences but, only ever really on a surface level. What it does reflect is a bit like Skins, which is to say a bit hyperbolic and of the late 2000s.

July and September gesture at authenticity without ever truly inhabiting it. That’s not to say that relationships between teenage girls can’t be harsh or cruel or manipulative or violent, they absolutely can be. It’s also not to say that bullying of the sort described in this book does not occur; it does and schools aren’t always equipped to tackle the smaller, insidious stuff (though I think the incident in this case at any school would have resulted in more than a week’s suspension for the bullies.)

The issue is that the style makes it ring false because it can’t go deeper than this faint, broad sweep at girlish anxiety and snapping violence. It’s mood over action or clarity. A very small particular gripe for me personally is the way this lack of clarity also generates a weird disconnection in setting. The novel seems to suggest that the girls are in a normal state school but so much of the description hints at a largesse no state school I’ve ever experienced still has, not even when I was at school under New Labour. There’s no shame in offering some specificity here, as it would help ground the reader in the world of the book.

All the little gaps, inconsistencies and inaccuracies compound under the author’s unwillingness to be specific (except for reminding us quite regularly that they once lived in Oxford). The intangible, or infelicitous, imagery also gets in the way of offering real information to the reader. For instance: “tinged with ever-dying stars”, or my least favourite “nipples like upturned exclamation marks”. It sounds like it evokes something but it falls apart under the briefest scrutiny. The lack of of precision about language, relationships, places, times, feelings, all add to the reader being kept in the dark and not in a way that pays off.

This also contributes to the reader’s response to the twist. I’m sure for many readers it does come as a surprise, but that’s less to do with careful signalling and plotting and more to the lack of clarity in the novel. Even though I guessed the twist quite early as it is something of a cliche, the moment of the twist is so unclear that you have to check your understanding with little help from the author. The ending is just as rushed and irritatingly unspecific, with an unnecessary tangent that felt like filler.

For the record, I think there is a much better, more complex and ultimately more evocative novel buried under the style and approach of Sisters. The section from Sheela’s perspective, told through a third person narrative voice, was by far and away the most convincing and rewarding part of the novel. The description of depression in particular, while often falling into similar stylistic traps as the rest of the novel, felt at least real and considered. Sheela’s struggles are both internal and external: how to mother through confusion and in the wake of abuse; how to love the thing that has changed your life; how to live when your body doesn’t want to. This section doesn’t quite nail its colours to the mast but, what I’m trying to say is: this is the section that was both the most vivid and the most readable. Part of me wishes for a novel built around Sheela instead, that would perhaps be enabled to feel both authentic but grounded.

More than anything this book is a frustration because it has good enough bones and a talent behind it that might make it work. But as it stands, I’m sad that it doesn’t. I'm glad I was able to read it ahead of the curve and really make my own mind up so thank you again to the publisher but, this was a disappointing read.

A difficult book for me to rate simply because the style of prose used (best described as lyrical) is not to my liking, and I can see tha many reviewers loved it. July and September have moved with their mum Sheela to an old family home once deserted now with new occupants, all hoping for a fresh start. However “Settle House” appears to have its own agenda, an unsettling place to live with its ghostly noises and hidden places. Two young, barely teenage, girls face an uncertain future. September is the controlling sister always seeking attention and July often feels inadequate in her shadow. Little support is forthcoming from Sheela lost in a fog of despair, with no partner, finding comfort in the arms of passing strangers. A short read, with a brutal ending, from a young and very talented author. Many thanks to the good people at netgalley for a gratis copy in exchange for an honest review and that is what I have written.

This is the first Daisy Johnson book I’ve read and she has a really wonderful way with words. Her writing style is very poetic and different from anything I’ve read before.

This book follows two sisters July and September who are 10 months apart in age. I felt like I was in a trance reading this book and their bizarre relationship. It was really captivating but I also felt a little confused at the end of it. I’m not sure if what I think happened actually happened!

I really love the cover of the book and the unusual writing style.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Oh my god this book is so good!

Do I need to write anything more? Probably!

I loved Everything Under by Daisy Johnson and the tautness, the lyricism, the ambiguity, the mythic nature of her writing and this is all back here in Sisters, exploring the sisterly bond between the characters July and September. Close - perhaps too close, cloying and dependent - that bond is stretched and contorted when they move into a new home following a tragic event in Oxford (no more details, read the book!)

That home oozes tension and threat - a gothic, isolated intense setting (possibly not best to read during lockdown!) and the tension ramps up wonderfully.

This is a novel which shifts under our feet, making us re-evaluate the beginning as we approach the (extraordinarily good) ending.

If anything, I would rate this book higher than Everything Under, more assured, more confident somehow. And if I could I would give it more than 5 stars!