Imogen West-Knights selects four books that best show Sibling Relationships
By Little, Brown Book Group
Imogen West-Knights selects four books that best show Sibling Relationships
By Little, Brown Book Group
Before I’d decided on anything else about it, I knew that I wanted my first book, Deep Down, to be about a brother and a sister. Sibling relationships are a hugely important part of many people’s childhoods: a place of safety, a boxing ring, a joke workshop and more besides. And while there seemed to be uncountable books about sisters and about brothers, there weren’t so many about mixed gender siblings. I’m still not quite sure why that should be, but as it happens many of my favourite books are about exactly that: a man and a woman, born into the same family, and how they fit into that ecosystem, and respond to it differently. Here are some of those books.
Imogen West-Knights
Deep Down: the 'intimate, emotional and witty' 2023 debut you don't want to miss
Imogen West-Knights
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The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot
£9.99 £9.49I find this book almost unbearably sad but love it for that reason. It occurs to me now that maybe the brother in my book ended up being called Tom because of Mill on the Floss. The book spans about fifteen years in the mid 1800s in the lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver, a brother and a sister who fail and fail again at showing their love for each other in the right ways. It’s thought to be the most autobiographical of all Eliot’s novels, drawing on her own very close and then broken relationship with her own brother, Isaac. Fair warning: the ending will mess you up.
The Gathering
Anne Enright
£9.99 £9.49eronica Hegarty has lost the closest of her nine siblings, Liam, to alcoholism-related suicide, and the gathering in the book’s title refers to his funeral. She spends the novel revisiting troubled moments in their shared history to try to establish where things went wrong for him. Anne Enright is a genius. This is her best book, in my view, and she won the Booker for it in 2007. But another of her novels, The Green Road, is also a masterclass in the slippery, tetchy relationships between adults yoked together by the accident of having been born to the same parents.
Commonwealth
Ann Patchett
£9.99 £9.49Commonwealth is the story of a blended family - the Keatings and the Cousins - which consists of six brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters who spend every summer together in Virginia. The sibling relationships in this book change and deepen with each passing year, in ways Patchett constantly surprises you with. Her characters are so real to me and so humanely drawn; there are no villains and no saints in her books. I also love a good sprawling family novel, and this one sprawls over five whole decades.