Thank you to Netgalley, Pushkin Press and Tiffany Tsao for this advanced reader's copy in return for my honest review. From the very first line this book drew me in. To say that I loved it and I found the dynamic between the sisters fantastic.

Great beginning ('when your sister murders three hundred people, you can't help but wonder why') and a good ending that has a kind of twisted logic to it - but I found the pacing of this not quite right. There's a l-o-o-o-o-n-g central part where all kinds of wheels are turning but the story doesn't seem to be getting anywhere. Various trips merge into each other and a whole courtship/difficult marriage seems to take up far more page space than is warranted (though the end deals with this in part). After not much happening, there's a sudden flurry of events and revelations towards the end but they start, to be honest, to become so melodramatic that they're almost cartoonish.

There are some lovely images along the way - the bagatelles lifting into flight on the catwalk, for example - but Tsao seems to be reaching for symbolism of cocooning and metamorphosis that doesn't quite work in the story as it stands. Great ideas, lots of potential but the story on the page doesn't seem to come to fruition in the way that might have been intended. Fabulous cover, though!

The Majesties
by Tiffany Tsao
Published by Pushkin Press

With its shocking opening, this quirky tale is a dramatic story of Gwendolyn & Estella - sisters with a shared childhood interest in entomology. This bugs & butterflies hobby leads to a business for one of them & aids a crime for the other.

We travel between continents and time periods. Life in Jakarta, studies in Berkley, USA, as jet-set family. It's not a disjointed time-lapse at all but we see how they're used to the glitzy high life of the Chinese Indonesian variety. But is it there just for others to see?

The way Tiffany Tsao writes about the tangled adventures makes us care about the sisters even though they're surrounded by unusual family dynamics with some puzzling & disturbing connections.

'When your sister's last words are "Please forgive me" it's fair to say life will change forever' lets us know this is no ordinary story.

Discovery of a confusing photo leads the sisters on an unexpected adventure & their worlds really start to unravel. Their curiosity could never even be close to what is actually revealed.

Definitely not your average warm & fuzzy read but the story delivers twists & turns all the way through to the final pages. We see riches & poverty collide, unthinkable plans hatched and family morals going out the window in the many threads of this dark story.

Also: Never order the Shark's Fin soup!

From the first line, this book grabbed me. I would have read it in one sitting if we hadn’t had a power cut that made reading in the dark impossible. Instead, I sat and sulked about how much I wanted to be reading THE MAJESTIES.

The Majesties is a family drama at its heart. It’s about a wealthy and powerful family in Indonesia for whom money has never been an object. When the children grow up, if they want to work, they’ll be handed a section of the huge conglomerate to run and set to work. They fly around the world on a whim to go shopping. It’s a wild and wonderfully wealthy lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean that the family are living the ideal life they like to present. The Majesties is set from Gwendolyn’s perspective as she dives into her memories of her and her sister to search for the real reason that her sister killed their family.

It’s hard to get into too much detail about the things that are uncovered because I had such an intoxicating experience uncovering the truth among the memories that I don’t want to spoil that experience for anyone. But I can say that through Gwendolyn’s eyes we start to see the truth behind their wealthy lifestyle and the darkness that shadows Gwendolyn and Estella as she gets closer and closer to finding the truth behind the murders. This isn’t an easy read by any means but for someone who loves dark books, like me, it was perfect. Not too long, not too short, the prose is tightly written and I like the way the past was gently unravelled without it feeling like I was facing a lot of wordy exposition.

And the ending? Hoo boy. There’s a sting in the tail that managed to do a complete rug pull on me and knocked this book from a four star rating to a solid five star within the last few pages.

This book was a fascinating read looking into the rich of Indonesia. I learned a lot and it gripped me to travel into another community. I loved it!

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Where to begin…..this is a bizarre book, part My Sister, the Serial Killer, part Killing Eve, but not quite as captivating, not quite as decadent, not quite as grotesque. The Majesties is a novel about metamorphosis and a quest for redemption set in Jakarta, Indonesia. The central characters are the incredibly wealthy and dysfunctional extended Chinese-Indonesian Sulinado family, and in particular sisters Estella and Gwendolyn. The Sulinados are a very powerful family, very good at “hiding the bad stuff”. Throughout the novel there are hints as to the source of their incredible fortune. Suggestions of corruption, violence and cosy deals with Government officials abound. The book traces the sequence of events that led to Estella becoming a mass murderer and the reasons behind her desire to "cleanse the family of greed and corruption". The first and final chapters are undoubtedly the best chapters in the book, which then settles into a longwinded narrative, for the main part, as to how Estella met her husband Leonard, winding over and back between university life in Berkeley California and married life in Jakarta. The book also features racial prejudice, domestic abuse and bullying as sub themes.

In a book with metamorphosis at it’s core, its no co-incidence that the author has a fascination with entomology (study of insects), in particular silkworms and butterflies who undergo their own transformation. However unlike silkworms and butterflies, the Sulinado family cannot shrug off the cocoons in which they hide, they cannot be transformed. When Estella realises this, she knows the only way to redeem them is by killing them all. The language and flow of the narrative was awkward at times. Yet, I found it strangely enthralling in parts despite the fact that none of the characters were likeable. As a reader, I felt a sense of disconnection with the novel as I could not empathise with anyone, I could not ‘root’ for any one character. While it was an interesting insight into Chinese-Indonesian culture (of which I know nothing), the book ultimately failed to live up to the expectations of the excellent opening chapter and left me with a sense of disappointment.

Many thanks to @netgalley& @pushkin_press for this ebook which I was gifted in return for my honest review.

Really enjoyed this dark, luscious look into the ultra rich in Indonesia. I was fascinated by the idea of the bagatelles, and the relationship between Doll and Estella. I did think the final few pages, the "big reveal" was a bit "unreliable narrator gone wild" but that may be a personal preference.

When you read the first line of this novel “When your sister murders 300 people you can’t help but wonder why” you can tell that you are being presented with a somewhat unusual tale. It turns into a deep and compelling read that explores sisterhood, family, culture and change and does not disappoint. The sister is Estella, the tale is told by her sister Gwendolyn (Doll), the only “survivor” of the murder plan. When all the rest of her family and close friends are deliberately and publicly poisoned at her grandfather’s eightieth birthday party she survives in a deep coma. Nobody knows she can hear or think, nevertheless this story reflects her ponderings as to why.
The family is of Chinese descent and they live largely in Jakarta, Indonesia. They have risen to wealth over the last few generations through the business acumen of their grandfather. As the family has expanded, so have the branches of the business and it is usual for women of the family (even if married) to run some. By most standards they are rich, but by their own standards not monstrously so and at the time of the tale are recovering from the Far Eastern recession. Anti-Chinese feelings that can escalate at these times means that the family has broad links (and often nationality) abroad. Wealth allows the children to be educated elsewhere and the families have holiday homes scattered around the world. But behind that multicultural aspect there are still deep expectations of close family connections across the generations and branches. Expectations are that marriages are usually within the Chinese family or community, meetings of all are common and private secrets will appear to be hard to maintain, although family myths will be strongly maintained. Estella seems to cope with this and find it reassuring. Gwendolyn is kicking harder against the traces (not yet married, she concentrates on setting up her own business).
The sisters had always been close. But at University in the USA Estella meets Leonard (one of the Chinese super rich) and will marry him. Expected to fit in with her new family (as well as maintain close links with the old) she struggles with the new and different expectations. Leonard is spoilt, demanding and unsympathetic to her desires. He will also expect to cut off her close links with her sister Doll. Gwendolyn will isolate herself in the USA first, then back home in Jakarta as Estella becomes increasingly desperate with her difficult life. Leonard an alcoholic will run down the family firm on his father’s death and will die early. Estella in her grief will have to try and rebuild a new life. She can spend more time with her sister and seemingly tries to rebuild their close links. Amidst the constraints she feels she is looking for “meaning” or change in life and in her broader family. We know that the results of this search trip her to mass murder. Or so we are told.
So if the purpose is to look for the reason she has killed – is this a reflection of her own personality or do others (family and community) bear responsibility? If so who? And is that for what they have done, or for what they have failed to do? A myriad of other questions follow. Does close family always provide enough support, or can it be destructive? Do place and time and circumstances have a bearing on the matter? Could one close caring person acting “in the right way” prevent disaster? Or do people walk into pain and disaster almost by accident, step by step unnoticed by the people around them?
So this is then a novel of morals and standards and responsibility. But Tsao firmly places it in a detailed and vibrant Chinese multi-generational family of characters – many of them who you will recognise whether you are Chinese or not! It shows the nature and risks of a scattered multi-national family too – something that is becoming increasingly common. Wealth, on a scale that many of us would never live with just seems to exacerbate the issues – but raises the whole issue of what is really important and do individuals recognise it. Tsao juggles all these strands expertly throughout the novel – but look for another quiet “kick” at the end that makes the reader need to review everything they have read. A first rate read.

A completely engrossing, thrillingly batshit crazy novel about family, culpability, and racial politics in Indonesia. The book starts arrestingly with Estella, an Indonesian-Chinese socialite, murdering 300 friends and family with poison slipped into the sharks fin soup at her grandfather’s 80th birthday banquet. The only survivor is her sister Gwendolyn who, now comatose, drifts into memory to understand her sister’s motivations. The two were intensely and intimately interlinked till Estella’s ill-fated marriage to a cruel, narcissistic, and capricious man. The last trait encouraged a conversion to Pentecostal Christianity of frightening fervour following the 1997 financial crisis, that would soon bring about his downfall and death. As the sisters rediscover their childhood intimacy, they began to unravel family secrets - an aunt thought dead is running a takeout Chinese restaurant in LA, their pillowy grandmother is revealed to be capable of unthinking cruelty, their parents are shown to be blindly complicit. This is a family for whom there is no redemption. The book casts a critical eye too on their segment of Indonesian society - the ridiculously rich Chinese who live a universe apart from their compatriots, barricaded by their wealth, fearful and feared. However the book suffers two main faults - the first in over-engineered turns of phrase, and the second in a trite twist ending. It seems to take itself a notch too seriously to be as outrageous as it is, yet for its faults it was nonetheless an extremely enjoyable read.

Really enjoyed this book.

What a unique plot and the twists and turns kept me on the edge of my page!

Would highly recommend.

Goodness me, this grabbed me by the throat and just didn't let go! Such a compelling opening..I was completely addicted. The pace, characterisation & setting was BEAUTIFULLY written and I'm still reeling from the end. I will be searching out the rest of this authors' work- cannot recommend highly enough!

The story of a rich Indonesian family of Chinese descent, with a mass murder from the outset and a smidgen of science-fiction added into the mix. A wonderful book – about families, the lies we tell each other and tell ourselves, the differences between perceptions of the Chinese in the east and in the west… and about insects.

2.5 stars

Such a great opener.
Then I felt as if it took a very long time to go anywhere.
Slow in its story telling,I'd got a bit bored by the half way point.

Thank you NetGalley and Pushkin Press for sending me an eARC of this book! All views and opinions discussed here are my own.

I expected this to be a really twisty, dark, and suspenseful thriller... what it was instead was a family drama that wasn’t that thrilling. The opening paragraphs were really gripping and I was intrigued, but then it just sort of went downhill for me as we flashback numerous times throughout Gwendolyn and Estellas lives to see what got them to this point. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it’s just not what I expected it the book. I thought it was going to keep me on my toes throughout but instead it left me feeling a bit bored. I did find it difficult to read at times and had to force myself to carry on with it.

The depictions of Chinese-Indonesian culture was interesting and showed me a life I didn’t know much about. These bits of the book were interesting to me and were a real eye opener.

The ending was honestly just odd and disappointing; it didn’t feel like a big “twist” to me because it was just weird. I am not a fan of twists like this because you almost have to go back over the whole book you’ve just read and reimagine every page. It was also so incredibly rushed and you got no time to digest what you were reading as the book was just over. I think this book needed better pacing and structuring; cut out some of the family drama in the middle and bring the reveal further forward. There’s just no pay off from the reveal because the book just ends 🤷🏻‍♀️

Release date 6th August so you can make your own mind up then!

I read somewhere that this novel has been compared to a mix of Crazy Rich Asians and the movie Fight Club. Having read it, I think that's pretty accurate and I'm still reeling from the punches of the latter having realised I saw only the glitz and glamour and not the romcom of the Crazy Rich Asians.

It's billed as a thriller but it's more of a family drama. A very dark family drama at that. A sister kills 300 people at a family party. Quite a premise. The novel delves into the lives of this family and of the two sisters in particular. It's dark in places. Very dark.Why would someone kill their entire family and friends? As Gwendolyn lies in a coma, she reflects on her sister's life and what might have led her to do such a terrible thing. The style of the storyline was intriguing as I wasn't sure who you could believe.

This got very dark and twisted. The family were complex and varied as were the locations where the novel was set - LA, Sydney, but most of all Jakarta. This is where we learn about the Chinese community there, the class differences, the oppression, the challenges and contradictions within it. There's quite a lot in this for being quite a short novel - and this is what was one of its weaknesses for me. There's too much of everything at times- subplots, memories and a stream of consciousness.

Having said that, there's a lot I do love. The unique way it pans out, the writing, the unusual plot and narrator. It's quirky. Darkily so and I was compelled to read more. It's not a thriller but a dark insight into a family, a facade, a glitzy life with a dark stain underneath.