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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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 […]