Sororicidal is an intimate, thoughtful novel that explores the fraught constancy of sisterhood and the ways we change, and don’t change, as we age.

Mary and Margot are sisters, growing up aristocratically in 1900s Adelaide. Even as children, devoted to each other and with no other company on their family’s vineyard, there is a seed of conflict between the girls. Mary is charismatic, confident and powerful; Margot is awkward, shy and aware of her sister’s manipulation, even as she submits to it. Then an adolescent indiscretion up-ends their lives and separates the sisters for more than a decade.

When they’re reunited, they’re both changed, but still unable to step out from the long shadow cast by their past. Mary and Margot are two orbiting planets – drawing together and drifting apart in a steady, inevitable cycle. They are the cause of each other’s largest grievances, the topic of their longest held grudges – but also each other’s most affectionate friend, the person who knows them best. And so the cycle continues throughout their lives, with each passing year adding more fuel to the fire under their simmering resentments, but also creating shared jokes and comfortable domestic habits that they cling to. In a patriarchal world still reeling from two World Wars, the fraught company of a sister is still preferable to being with, and being defined by, a man.

Across the four sections of this novel, we journey through four chapters of the sisters’ lives, and with each we sit beside one of the women, getting a unique window into their self-perceptions, and the fixations that drive them from girlhood to old age. It’s a masterful psychological study that reminds us that everything is a matter of perception; people rarely see us the way we see ourselves; and even the people we know best are capable of surprising us in new and terrible ways.