The best novels about sinister sister relationships and strange sisterhoods

It’s always refreshing to read portrayals of unconventional female relationships, something I’m particularly interested in when writing my own novels. Because our relationships are rarely straightforward or predictable, are they?

As the title suggests, the relationship between Korede and her serial killer sister, Ayoola, is far from conventional…and while the story delves into some dark and gruesome places, it is a thriller that had me laughing as much as covering my eyes in horror. This accomplished debut goes firmly on my ‘couldn’t put it down’ list – it’s warm, funny, and page-turningly good!

Reading this novel again, almost forty years after its first publication, reminds me of the genius of its author, Margaret Atwood, in her portrayal of women's inner lives. 

In this book, we see sisters of a different kind – divided women, repressed by a brutal state, controlled by fear and enslavement. It is a dystopian novel, yet so much of the story is recognizable to us as credible representations of the past, present, and future sufferings of women. The novel is a modern horror, of sorts – but at the same time, it is a testament of hope and resistance, of sisterhood and strength. The character of Offred stayed with me long after I’d finished the book all those years ago, in fact, to this very day.

I love a story with ‘outsiders’ at the heart of it, and Shirley Jackson’s gothic masterpiece gives us exactly that. This book tells the tale of the strange Blackwood sisters who live in a crumbling great house on the outskirts of a small American town, whose locals view the reclusive family with suspicion. 

Unsettling from the outset, we are nevertheless attracted to the main character, Merricat, whose possible involvement in the poison murder of the rest of her family only spurs us on to keep reading. I’m always drawn to these characters, the ones who don’t behave quite as convention or stereotype would have them; the ones who subvert our expectations in the smallest of ways. This is a book I never tire of reading.

What if, all over the world, women suddenly discovered they now had all the power? Questions around equality are always at the center of my own writing and much of what I read, so this book went straight to the top of my reading pile when it was released!

This is a dystopian novel with a difference – it turns the status quo of millennia upon its head to create a world in which girls and women can literally dominate men with a flick of the fingers and a flash of electrocution. Bad men are overthrown, and new sisterhoods are formed, but as with all types of control, it doesn’t take long for power to turn to abuse. Everyone, men and women alike, should read it.

When this book first came out, telling the story of a woman and her teenage daughters fleeing across rural America in the wake of a suspicious fire at a fundamentalist cult, I knew I’d love it. Who isn’t intrigued by the idea of closed communities and coercive control–and escape?

Four long days into the women’s getaway, they crash the car, and the three of them – strange-looking and terrified–are stranded at a dusty gas station with nothing and no one to turn to. I loved how the writer gradually allows us to piece together the disturbing events of the preceding years, showing the two sisters discovering a world of difference outside the confines of the sect walls. This is a story of resilience and silent hopes and of the bond between women across generations.