Two Sisters

Description

'A book at once bold, magnanimous, heart-breaking and riveting' HOWARD JACOBSON 'Beautiful. Affecting. Erudite.' SUSIE ORBACH TWO SISTERS publishes on the 30th anniversary of Blake Morrison's ground-breaking book And When Did You Last See Your Father? which forged the way for a new genre of confessional memoir. 'She's gone, that's all, and though there's no retrieving her I'd like to make sense of who she was and what she became. It wasn't just that she changed over time. She could change from day to day. Drink made it worse but the origins went deeper. You never knew which you'd get, the kind and loving Gill or her doppelganger. Two sisters.' Blake Morrison has lost a sister and a half-sister in recent years. Both are the subjects of this remarkable and heart-breaking memoir, along with a forensic examination of sibling relationships in history and literature. Blake's sister Gill struggled with alcoholism for a large part of her life, and her shocking death is the starting point for Two Sisters. Blake returns to their childhood to search for the origins of her later difficulties, and in doing so unearths the story behind his half-sister, Josie. As he unravels these narratives, Blake deals movingly in the guilt and shame that will be familiar to every person who has struggled with addiction in their family. He is unflinching in doing so, and the result is a book which provides testament to that common struggle, as well as acknowledging the complex, hidden forces on which all our lives are based. Two Sisters is the extraordinary new memoir from the chronicler of human frailty, Blake Morrison.

Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and journalist. His non-fiction books include And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize and the Esquire/Volvo/Waterstone's Non-Fiction Book Award, As If (1997), about the murder of the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, and a memoir of his mother, Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002). His poetry includes the collections Dark Glasses (1984), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, and Shingle Street (2015) He is a regular literary critic for the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

'Beautiful. Affecting. Erudite.' SUSIE ORBACH 'Morrison writes with a reckless respect for the truth' GUARDIAN 'A ground-breaking confessional memoir' BBC Books of 2023 'A book at once bold, magnanimous, heart-breaking and riveting... As a chronicler of the damage wrought by small family secrets, Blake Morrison is without equal. Exquisite in its numbed sadness and final bleak forgiveness, Two Sisters moves beyond personal loss to a fascinating consideration of 'sisters' as a category of tragedy in their own right' HOWARD JACOBSON 'Blake Morrison lays one of the most basic human relationships out on the slab, dissects it and displays it... the effect is pungent, disturbing, entirely unforgettable' THE TIMES 'Harrowing, candid and clear-eyed, unflinchingly honest and self-critical. Two sad stories. The strangeness of families and the weight of the past. The guilt of being OK' NICCI GERRARD 'Blake Morrison is a writer who tenderly and relentlessly lifts every stone, and the stones beneath, searching for the roots of human feelings and human relations, and revealing them to the reader' LOUISA YOUNG