Consent

Description

Longlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize 2021. Saskia and Jenny - twins - are alike in appearance only. Saskia is a grad student with a single-minded focus on her studies, while Jenny is glamorous, thrill-seeking, and capricious. Still, when Jenny is severely injured in an accident, Saskia puts her life on hold to be with her sister. Sara and Mattie are sisters with another difficult dynamic. Mattie, who is younger, is intellectually disabled. Sara loves nothing more than fine wines, perfumes, and expensive clothing, and leaves home at the first opportunity. But when their mother dies, Sara inherits the duty of caring for her sister. Arriving at the house one day, she is horrified to discover that Mattie has married their mother's handyman. The relationship ends in tragedy. Now, Sara and Saskia, both caregivers for so long, are on their own - and come together through a cascade of circumstances as devastating as they are unexpected. Razor-sharp and profoundly moving, Consent is a thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of familial duty, of how love can become entangled with guilt, resentment, and regret.

Annabel Lyon is the author of the novel The Golden Mean, a bestseller in Canada that won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Award, and has been translated into fourteen languages. She is also the author of a story collection, Oxygen; a book of novellas, The Best Thing for You; and two juvenile novels, All-Season Edie and Encore Edie. She lives in British Columbia with her husband and two children.

I raced through this gripping read about sisters, guilt, grief and revenge... I couldn't put it down. * Daily Mail * Blistering... The most truthful exploration of sisterhood I have enjoyed since Fleabag * The Times * So, so clever and so concise yet just goes into the most profound issues in such depth * Vick Hope, Women's Prize for Fiction Judge 2021 * Consent might be closest to Lyon's earlier work in short fiction, which earned her comparisons to fellow-Canadian fiction writer Alice Munro. Lyon...also manages to break new ground by blending her short fiction with aspects of the thriller novel, and harkening back to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. But in Consent, we get a chance to hear the women's side of the story, as Lyon beautifully interweaves the stories of two sets of sisters, Saskia and Jenny, alongside Sara and Mattie. The two through-lines collide, setting in motion a chain of events that races to the finish. * Chicago Review of Books * This tightly and beautifully written novel folds time and longing into every sentence and every page. It takes risks with form to reveal a profoundly human story, and it leaves us with an unexpected sensation: that this is real life - it contains all kinds of deep and difficult loves, and not all of us can survive them. It's a brave, even dangerous book and so compelling that I read it from cover to cover over the course of one night. * Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young * This generation's answer to Alice Munro * Vancouver Sun * Combining ethical dilemmas with material indulgence, Consent is a heady, intoxicating blend. In slick and sensual prose, Lyon challenges what it means to be a sister, a carer, an addict, an enabler and maybe even a murderer. * Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers * Mesmerizing... An intense, intimate novel of love, grief, and murder [with] a deliciously dark conclusion. * Publishers Weekly * This novel captivates in plot... It follows two sets of sisters whose lives converge and diverge in eerily similar ways. * Entertainment Weekly * From the author of The Golden Mean, which won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Consent is about Sara who, after forcing an annulment of what Sara sees as a hasty marriage to a man targeting an inheritance, becomes a caregiver to her intellectually challenged sister, Mattie. After a tragedy, their lives converge with the second set of sisters. Saskia has put her life on hold to be caregiver for her twin, Jenny, who has been severely injured in an accident. The intersection of the stories, says Steven Beattie in the Quill and Quire, "comes as a shock." * The Millions * A genuinely surprising read, rooted in a keen, if unsettling, understanding of human nature... Consent defies conventional narrative, embracing instead a sense of emotional time... This is, after all, how we think and feel, how families and relationships develop and age, how we grow. Life, Lyon shows, isn't a straight line. * Robert J. Wiersema, Toronto Star * Beyond that loaded title is a novel of quiet moments that together build to a dramatic crescendo. The stories of two pairs of diametrically opposed sisters - Sara, an academic, and Mattie, who lives with a learning disability; and twins Saskia, the wallflower, and Jenny, the magnetic It girl - resist connecting until late in the game. But when they do, the results are as shocking as the ancient Greek canon that Lyon has long mined for inspiration. * Quill and Quire * Explores our secret lives and the outward shows that we put on. It is dark, curious and a bit creepy. * The i *