Sisterland, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Sisterland

Author: Curtis Sittenfeld

ISBN-13: 978-0385618496

Publisher: Doubleday

Guideline Price: Sterling18.99

Those who are not twins are often fascinated by the idea of what it might be like to be one of a pair, to be so close to a sibling that you can – we like to imagine – hear the other’s thoughts. And so twins with supernatural powers have long been a cultural trope, which must be rather annoying for actual twins and their families.

It seems there are plenty of people who are slightly unnerved by the idea of two different people with such an obviously close connection.

There's nothing unnerving about Kate Tucker, the narrator of Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant new novel, Sisterland. When we meet her, it's 2009 and Kate is 34 years old, a determinedly ordinary stay-at-home mother living in the St Louis suburbs with her academic husband and their two young children. But ever since their earliest childhood, she and her identical twin sister, Violet, known as Vi, have experienced what they call the "senses", an instinctive awareness of things that are either going to happen in the future, or that are happening right now to someone else.

Throughout their childhood, the senses remain their secret, something never mentioned at school where being twins means being viewed as “a benign oddity”.

But when Kate is invited to a slumber party by a popular girl called Marisa, the secret comes out, and when the senses reveal something Marisa doesn't want to hear, Kate and Vi are viewed as freaks. (Unsurprisingly, Sittenfield, the author of Prep writes about the agonies of adolescence with insight and wit). Ever since then, Kate's life has been, to paraphrase Orwell, one long struggle not to be laughed at – or feared. Vi, however, embraces her difference, to Kate's immense discomfort.

As the sisters grow older, their lives become more and more different, and the story moves back and forwards in time, from the twins’ childhood, adolescence and young adulthood to the events of 2009 and back to various points in between. Sittenfeld handles these various moves so deftly there is no sense of dislocation. By 2009, Kate is living in suburban bliss with Jeremy. Her closest friend is Hank, the husband of Jeremy’s colleague Courtney; as a Harvard-educated African-American artist now living as a stay-at-home dad in a white midwestern suburb, he too knows how it feels to be an outsider. No one apart from Jeremy knows about Kate’s senses, and she has wilfully turned her back on her psychic powers after becoming a mother, terrified of predicting, or just imagining, tragedies befalling her children.

The fearless, funny and impetuous Vi, on the other hand, has become a professional psychic, receiving guidance from a benign being she calls Guardian.

When she appears on television in the autumn of 2009 telling the world she believes a serious earthquake is going to hit St Louis, Kate is appalled. Soon Vi becomes a national media sensation, and Kate is confronted with the fact that her own senses aren’t as dormant as she might like. As Kate’s fears grow, Jeremy refuses to take them seriously. Tiny fault lines start to appear, not just in her marriage, but in her relationships with those around her. As the predicted date of the earthquake gets nearer, the book becomes as tense as a thriller. What will it mean for the sisters if the earthquake does happen? And what will it mean if it doesn’t?

The idea of Sittenfeld writing about the supernatural may surprise fans of her earlier books. In novels such as the wonderful Prep and American Wife, she wrote about the complex realities of the world as we know it. And yet despite its ostensibly fantastic subject matter, there's nothing otherworldly about Sisterland; the sisters' "senses" feel utterly convincing and strangely ordinary, and Vi and Kate are so convincingly drawn they defy any annoying creepy stereotypes.

In fact, all the characters are superbly depicted in subtle shades, from the twins’ distant father and depressive mother to the patient Jeremy and the charming Hank. But inevitably, the sisters steal the show. Sittenfeld isn’t afraid to show her characters in an unflattering light, and Kate can be judgmental – when she discovers that Vi is romantically involved with a woman, she masks her distaste with supposed concern for their widowed father, whom she claims will be confused. Kate thinks Vi is flaky and irresponsible, and she definitely has a point; Vi thinks Kate is uptight and overprotective, and she might have a point too. They fight a lot, and they sometimes drive each other mad, but the connection between them is always there.

And it's not just because they're twins. Sisterland is a book about the bonds between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between friends and lovers, but most of all it's about the bonds between siblings. As children, Vi puts a sign on the twins' bedroom door reading "Sisterland: Population 2."

The relationship between Kate and Vi may sometimes be fraught, but there’s a sense of two people pushing against safe boundaries; like many siblings with a strong relationship, they can be ruder to each other than they could be to any friend, because neither of them will ever really walk away. And Sittenfeld is particularly good at capturing the way a shared childhood, whether happy or sad, creates an utterly unique bond. As Vi tells Kate towards the end of the book, “Whatever happens, wherever you go, you’ll always still be living in Sisterland.”

This original and compassionate novel shows that it’s not such a bad place to be.

Anna Carey’s third book, Rebecca Rocks, will be published next month.