The Sisters Antipodes A Memoir

The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir

A gorgeous, piercing memoir of two families link through adult betrayal- and of fierce childhood will to survive in them.

When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls, the younger two- one of them Jane- sharing a birthday.

With so much in common, the two families became almost instantly inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners- divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a 'silent, numb shock, like a crack inside a stone, not enough to split it but inside, quietly fissuring.' And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of wordless combat for love of their fathers.

The sisters' contest, recounted by Jane Alison, with stunning emotional insight, is waged throughout less-than-innocent childhoods- and ends in a tragedy that is the same time unthinkable and inevitable.

"From its calm, startling first sentence, this book is a clear-eyed account of a tumultuous childhood that happened, literally and figuratively, all over the place. Jane Allison writes about displacement, identity, belonging, fear and perhaps most incredibly, rivalry. She may have felt insecure as a child, but she's incredibly secure as a writer; and it's the strange mixture- precise and graceful descriptions of profoundly unsettling events- that underlies the alchemy of this book.' Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index.

Jane Alison is the author of the critically acclaimed novels, The Love-Artists, The Marriage of the Sea and Natives and Exotics. She lives in Miami Beach and teachers in the MFA programs of the University of Miami and Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Sisters Antipodes: A Memoir
Allen and Unwin
Author: Jane Alison
Price: $32.99