Sisters, by Daisy Johnson — a skilfully crafted gothic mystery
“Here it is. I lay it out now. Here is everything I have.” The closing line of Sisters would be, in a more conventional narrative, a perfectly enticing way to begin a story. And in a way, that’s what it is: only at this point could a reader begin to recount what has been happening […]
The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week: To understand the future of work, look deep into our past, writes anthropologist James Suzman
For three decades, I have been documenting the lives of the Ju/’hoansi people of the north-western Kalahari, and their often traumatic encounter with modernity. The Ju/’hoansi are perhaps the best known of the handful of societies who still sustained themselves by hunting and gathering well into the 20th century. And to them, very little about […]
Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is a short, atmospheric horror novel full of strange sentences, claustrophobic rooms and distorted, converging bodies: Anna Leszkiewicz reviews Daisy Johnson in the New Statesman
In Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides, a group of teenage boys are so captivated by the Lisbon sisters – five mysterious teenage girls, shut up together in their family home – that they procure the youngest sister’s diary after she dies by suicide at 13. “Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single […]
The New York Times includes Daisy Johnson’s Sisters in their 7 important books released this week
‘Sisters’ Builds a Gothic Plot to an Artful and Shocking Climax: the New York Times raves about Daisy Johnson’s new novel
Daisy Johnson’s new novel, “Sisters,” starts with a journey that ends at a house in the middle of nowhere. Sheela, a children’s writer, has driven from Oxford to the eastern edge of the North York Moors with her teenage daughters, September and July, our narrator for much of the book, in the back seat. It’s […]
‘This is a novel Shirley Jackson would have been proud to have written: terrifically well-crafted, psychologically complex and chillingly twisted’: Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is reviewed in The Observer
If I could bring any writer back from the dead, I think I’d choose Shirley Jackson, only because she’d write so very well about what it was like to be dead. But then again, I might not have to, because Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, her work a dark torrent of nightmarish […]
Fake Law by The Secret Barrister: the unnamed laywer returns to debunk the myths behind big recent legal stories
A baby is condemned to death by British judges. A homeowner who defends his property from burglars somehow ends up being the one facing prison. And when our legal system isn’t being used against the innocent like this, it is instead siding with the guilty, whether it’s the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported thanks […]
Against the law: why judges are under attack, by the Secret Barrister
Critics of the prime minister tend to deride him as inconsistent; a popularity obsessed, anthropomorphised Groucho Marx quote for whom fidelity to principle can never trump fidelity to self-interest. But in Boris Johnson’s defence, there is one belief to which he has remained steadfast over the past 12 months: his determination to control the independent […]
Megan Hunter’s The Harpy and Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock are in Vogue
It’s been a long summer. And it might be an even longer fall. With most TV and film production paused, theater on an indefinite hiatus, and musicians doling out their home-engineered albums on their own sweet time, what’s a culture-creature to consume? Thankfully, there are books to sustain us. Below, some of the novels Vogue’s […]
In “Sisters”, love and danger are grippingly entwined: Daisy Johnson’s new novel is reviewed in The Economist
The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud. “Sisters”, her second novel, is a gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale. Click here to read the full review.