Strange, Mysterious and Beautiful: Rachel Mills Recommends Essential Novels of Sisterhood

Sisters have fascinated writers forever—Pride and Prejudice, Cold Comfort Farm, Women In Love, Atonement, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Virgin Suicides—there’s a rich seam to be found in the uniquely special and complicated relationship between female siblings. Shakespeare sometimes gave them short shrift—conniving Goneril and Reagan ganging up on their dad and baby sister and the  “weird sisters” of Macbeth—which fed into a misogynistic narrative of fear which often saw all the sisters of a family fall foul of witch trials. But the bond between sisters is strange and mysterious; it is both a constant mystery and delight how someone more genetically similar to me than anyone on the planet can be so different, but she is the only person in the world who can relate to the exact specifics of my childhood and the eccentricities of our parents.

Here are some of my favorite fictional sisters.

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My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Set in Nigeria, this is a brilliant darkly comic novel about how far you’d go to protect your sister…if she has a tendency to murder her ex-boyfriends. I totally related to Korede’s tough call—could I ever turn my sister in? Though I think I might draw the line at helping with the clean-up. It’s a gripping and ultimately moving thriller—what will Korede do when her sister starts dating a colleague of hers? How far can you stretch a sisterly bond till it breaks?

The White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lyn Bracht

This is the most powerful story about two Korean sisters separated during Japanese occupation in WW2—Hana is taken to Japan and forced to become a comfort woman, meanwhile Emi left behind grows up and spends her life searching for her lost sister. The sisters are bonded not only by blood—they are haenyeo, the remarkable free diving women who can hold their breath and reach incredible depths in the ocean to catch fish. Alongside the heartbreaking testament to what many Korean women faced in the war, I read it as a story of how sisters need each other to keep their family’s sacred wisdom alive—the skill of diving, like so many skills, is passed down only through the female line.

Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom

Abigail Bergstrom’s second novel features one of the most grippingly dysfunctional families you can meet. Buried resentments, family secrets, and claustrophobic unaddressed trauma threatens to break the three Wyn sisters as they return to their family home in Wales. The brilliant dialogue—full of sarcasm, barbs, resentment, infuriation, competition but also underpinned by love—is so very perfectly sisterly!

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Despite living in the most landlocked part of the British midlands in the 1980s, we were obsessed with the adventures of these 1929 pre-war kids messing about on boats in the Lake District. The Swallows were a pretty dull group of four siblings—Susan was always doing the cooking and discussing the best way to scramble egg, while bossy John was some kind of Tory MP in the making. The Amazons however—now those are some sisters. They give themselves pirate names, Nancy and Peggy, they are fearless on the high seas of…Lake Windemere, they challenge the Swallows to mortal combat, and are a complete menace to their long suffering uncle, renamed Captain Flint, who really just wants to get on with writing his memoir. Complete role models.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

This rightly renowned novel is an incredible exploration of a believable historical situation where twin Black girls, Desiree and Stella, born in 1938 Louisiana. As they are lighter skinned, they could “pass” as white; and when they run away to New Orleans to seek their fortunes together, Stella decides to do just this. She slips completely into her new identity, marrying a white man, and taking advantage of all the racial privileges denied to her sister. Desiree does not. The novel follows what this does to them, and to the next generation; with some amazing historical detail, and lessons every bit as relevant today as in the 50s.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple

I love all of Maria Semple’s books—the new Go Gentle is completely amazing. But the sisterhood story at the heart of Today Will Be Different must be one of the most moving. Over the course of the one day setting, we piece together narrator Eleanor Flood’s backstory—who is this mysterious sister her own son does not know about? Why are they estranged? And what is the significance of this poignant graphic novel-within-a-novel ‘The Flood Sisters’? Being by Maria Semple, it’s about so, so much else, and also incredibly funny alongside the tears.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield

I reread this in the wake of the amazing stage production at the National Theatre in London, and was plunged back into my ballet obsessed childhood where I must have read and wept at it a hundred times. Not everything stands up to a modern eye, but the dynamics of the Fossil sisters, as they come to terms with their different personalities and passions, and finally learn that if they support each other they can be whoever they want to be—actress, pilot or ballerina – had me in tears all over again.

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The Players Club by Rachel Mills is available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.