Sisters

National Book Award-Winning Author: A second wife is haunted by the first in a novel that “expertly deploys revelations like land mines” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune).


From the acclaimed author of I Married You for Happiness, Sisters is a “masterpiece” (The Boston Globe) that gives a very different portrait of marital life, exposing the intricacies of a new marriage sprung from betrayal.

Lily Tuck’s unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife—known only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. Will the narrator ever equal she intellectually, or ever forget the betrayal that lies between them? And what of the secrets between her husband and she, from which the narrator is excluded? The daring and precise build up to an eerily wonderful denouement is a triumph of subtlety and surprise, in a riveting psychological portrait of marriage, infidelity, and obsession.