Sisterly Love is about the unique bonds of sisterhood. … Am I telling a story in this book? It is certainly not a story with its conventional beginning, middle and end, although all that does happen in it. But I have wanted to depict eras and places through the lives of two sisters and these come and go at will, following the need that each of the sisters has to relate her memories or to comment on her present. So I suppose I could say that there is a story-line, but it is not conventionally told. (author)
The story of their lives begins in the early years of the twentieth century with the usual sibling rivalries and disputes exaggerated by the presence of an obnoxious aunt and we revisit them after they make a parallel start with their secretarial careers - both the proper emancipated females of the nineteen thirties - it is there that the parallel ends. For Elsie typifies the solid, conservative, hard-working office girl. Lillian shifts with ease from one boyfriend to another, from one husband to another, from one boss to another, from one country to another, yet she always returns to take refuge by either Elsie’s or Horace’s (their young brother’s) home fires. By dint of Lillian’s wanderings, the novel moves from London to an English country village, to South Africa, to Australia, to Spain, back to London, all vividly evoked through reminiscence.
It is loneliness in their advancing years which forces them into each other’s company, despite themselves. It is the sadness of having nothing else in life which inevitably flings them against one another painfully peeling away the layers of their past existences and forcing them to surrender themselves to the irritating state of undesired dependence.
It is the inescapable pathos of two lives reduced by the passing years to grumpy proximity in a small bed-sitter that breathes life into Sisterly Love. My aim was to write about the sadness of old age with a certain humour, but I have also tried to touch the chords of the reader’s sensitivity.
