This excellent novel is the story of sisters September and July and their mother Sheela. The girls are so entwined it’s hard to know where one starts and the other ends. Following an incident in Oxford they go to Settle House near the coast of the North York Moors and what happens there is emotional, powerful and full of intriguing questions. The story is principally told by the two sisters.

This story is beautifully written and full of atmosphere provided mostly by the house. To Sheela the house is a living organism as it’s somewhat creaky, it has cracks and flaws which sums up her disastrous relationship with the girls father Peter who died several years ago. The girls personalities come across strongly, September is disruptive and dominant but she fills the gaps in Julys more fearful personality with the two making a whole. It’s like the girls are pieces of a jigsaw that fit together and conjoin. The girls are both outsiders but it’s bothers September less and she copes better than July.

There are many themes in this story - there’s destruction which is symbolised by Sheela and Peter’s relationship; there’s isolation which is what happens to the girls at school but also both girls isolate Sheela as they don’t need her like they need each other. There’s control - September of July and their mother and there’s also grief and sadness. The end is extremely overwhelming in its power and it’s also unexpected.

Overall, I love this beautiful and very different story. At times it’s a bit weird and you don’t see the big picture until the end which I really like. The cover is stunning and a terrific reflection of the story. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage Publishing for the ARC.

I wasn’t initially taken by this novel, but of course I got drawn in and ended up devastated by it. Somewhere between a psychological thriller and a first-person bildungsroman, Sisters builds on Johnson’s very particular style despite having very different source material from her first two books, Fen (which I haven’t actually read yet but desperately want to!) and Everything Under (which I loved). Despite being a big fan of first-person narrative, I have to say that the my favourite bits were Sheela’s third-person sections, which helped to ground the novel in some sort of reality away from the insular world of the eponymous sisters. I’m excited to see this novel do well when it comes out later in the year, as I’m sure it’ll make it on to shortlists and all of that.

Psychological horror.

Sisters September and July were born within ten months of each other. They are closer than close. After an incident at school in Oxford, their mother takes them to live in the abandoned family home on the coast. Approaching adulthood, July feels something shift in the bond with her sister.

An intense and unsettling study of sibling dynamics, with themes of depression, bereavement and bullying.

Johnson masterfully builds the sinister atmosphere. In her hands, the coastal home takes on an ever-watchful presence. No character or detail is extraneous. Occasionally, her imagery obtrudes on the story, where it sounds beautiful but leaves the reader wondering what it actually means. However, these are rare occurrences in otherwise surgically precise language.

Satisfyingly disturbing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC.

Sisters is a disquieting novel about two sisters who've moved into an old house they used to visit when they were younger. July and September are sisters with a bond people don't understand. When something happens at school, their mother moves them across the country to a house on the Yorkshire moors. Free from rules and structure, the sisters can continue with their usual hobbies and traditions, but July feels something changing between them, and the house seems to have mysteries of its own.

This is a short novel that explores a complex sibling relationship with a gothic-tinged atmosphere, moving between the present and memories of the past as what happened to the sisters is revealed. The characters were intriguing (the narrative of the novel makes it important not to give away too much), though it did feel like lots of elements couldn't be explored much due to the length of the book. It probably benefited from going into the book not knowing anything really about it (which possibly makes reviewing it redundant) and I did find the style took a moment to settle into, but the tension was built up well and there were a lot of good little details about July and September that created an atmosphere and showed the darkness in their dynamic.

Sisters is a difficult book to categorise, a kind of artsy gothic book with some thriller tropes and an interesting look at sibling dynamics at extremes that can be read in one or two sittings.

July and her sister September move with their mother Sheela from Oxford to a crumbling house in Whitby which was the birthplace of their Danish father, who died some time before. The reader is drawn into July’s world: she is enjoined in an almost symbiotic relationship with her sister and feels the house as a living entity, breathing and groaning around them. Their mother retreats to bed, food appears and things are cleaned sporadically, July imagines her mother emerges to do these at night when the sisters are asleep.

Slowly the reason why they needed to move from Oxford are revealed (unnecessarily signalled in the Good Reads blurbJ as July continues to be dominated by the almost malign presence of September.

The tone is Gothic and the writing poetic and lyrical, with the odd infelitious phrase (eg ‘the mice were breeding like rabbits under the floorboards’). I was gripped by the novel, which is short and can be read in a couple of sittings. It is a very good second novel from Daisy Johnson.

Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a review copy.

“She had 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, and she housed excitement and love and despair and in the Settle House she houses an unsettling worry that she finds difficult to shake, an exhaustion that smothers the days out of her.”

I loved Daisy Johnson’s debut novel “Everything Under” (which lead to her being the youngest person shortlisted for the Booker Prize) – a novel I described as “a literary novel of the liminal, language, leaving and legend”

And that in turn lead me to her first publication – the short story collection “Fen” which I described as thematically about “transitions; boundaries; sexuality; earth and mud; water, rivers, boats and barges; metamorphosis and shapeshifting; legend, English folklore and ancient magic, grounded in the landscape; language and the power of words.”

This is her third book and one which I think draws on a slightly different tradition than the Greek legend and English folklore of its two predecessors: horror novels and films.

In the Guardian’s Books That Made Me column, Johnson said her comfort read was “The Shining” ”give me a scary book and a long evening every day” and she has commented elsewhere on being born on Halloween and that ”I loved reading books where the everyday is inhabited by the weird, where the normal becomes strange. Horror teaches us about suspense and tension, about the edges where belief can stretch and morph”

The book is about two very close sisters – July and her 10 month older sister September. They live with their mother Sheela (a writer of illustrated children’s stories based on fictional adventures of the sisters), their Danish father having died some time after separating from their mother. July and September are very close, but different in character, the fiercely tempered September is the domineering one (and seemingly with something of the most unattractive traits of her father’s character), July the misfit follower. After some girls at their Oxford school trick July into sexting, a knife armed September plots a show down to teach the girls a lesson, and the repercussions lead to the girls leaving school and the family Oxford, retreating to an old and run-down coastal house “Settle House” in the North Yorkshire Moors. The house is now owned by Peter’s sister and is where Peter and later September were born.

The book opens with them arriving at the house, and we switch between a lengthy first party account form July and third party accounts from Sheela (with a brief section from the Settle House itself) including as the book progresses one which go back to examine the events in Oxford.

As July’s account progresses we become like her (and, despite its name, the House) increasingly unsettled as to what she is experiencing and what she is reading – and (as in Johnson’s quote above) the house itself as well as July’s senses start to stretch and morph at the edges and its probably more accurate to say that the weird is occasionally visited by the everyday (rather than vice versa).

This book is difficult to discuss further.

The eponymous sisters we are told “liked reading the twist in books first” – but by contrast Daisy Johnson herself has been reluctant to discuss the myth on which “Everything Under” is based (and has queried reviews which mention it in the first few lines) and similarly the twist (or twists) in this book are integral to the experience of reading it.

What I can perhaps say is that what seems to be a satisfactory but (I felt) ultimately predictable and underwhelming resolution to the mystery (perhaps one I would expect to see more in a psychological holiday-read thriller and which briefly made me wonder if the book should have been marketed as “Girl Girl” rather than “Sisters” as a signal of its genre) takes a more emotional turn followed by a second and more satisfactory ending.

Overall I found this a very enjoyable book and further evidence of Johnson’s skills and abilities but at the same time slightly disappointing compared to what seemed to be the greater depth, fluidity and particularly engagement with legend and language of “Everything Under”.

If there is a theme to this book I would describe it as occupancy and containment: the opening quote shows some of the relationships drawn between people and houses; we also have the close relationship between the sisters (is it symbiotic or ultimately parasitic); the way in which the characters of the two parents inhabit their children.

In Daisy Johnson’s Booker-listed debut novel (impressive start!), a river flowed through it and held things together. Here, in Sisters, it is a house that acts as a kind of focal point, at least location-wise.

September and July are sisters, born just 10 months apart. Their mother is raising them as a single parent after their father’s death and, when July experiences bullying at school, September decides to take matters into her own hands resulting in a tragedy that sees the family head off to the north of England to the aforementioned house, Settle House, where they attempt to, errmm, settle.

This is one of those books where it would be unfair to say anything else about the plot. To begin with, it reads like a straightforward story of two very close sisters, one a rebel and one more acquiescent. But, bubbling under the surface, there are ongoing hints that there is more going on than we think. Gradually, it becomes clear. Except it doesn’t - what you think is happening isn’t what is happening. At least, not quite. Eventually, it all slots into place.

This is a book that is at times a story of family relationships, at times a ghost story or gothic horror of some kind, and at times an exploration of grief. Often it is all three of these together.

Overall, I found this an absorbing book to read but it didn’t have the same power as Everything Under. Johnson writes very well about family relationships and makes interesting use of the house as a sort of additional protagonist (sometimes the house is like a person, sometimes the people are like buildings). The book is often creepy or uncomfortable which makes for a fun read!

3.5 stars rounded up.

I didn't like Everything Under but was curious to give Johnson another try with this book: nope, sorry, she just isn't a writer I can get along with. I'm sure mine will be a minority opinion but for what it's worth I disliked the prose which often feels pretentious, try-hard and sometimes plain meaningless: 'sleep is heavy, without corners', 'my insides are filled with bees', 'alarm grows in my bone marrow and swans up my throat'. Then there's the 'twist' which arrives with all the subtlety of a potboiler - it's crude, it's a staple of popular psychological thrillers, and it's not delivered with nuance. The book is packed with issues but they're skimmed over rather than treated with depth. For me this is superficial and shallow, stating the obvious and skimming all kinds of surfaces - but I expect many readers will disagree. Great cover, though!