I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, Lily Tuck and Atlantic Monthly Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your work with me.

I had not 'found' Lily Tuck prior to reading this short novel. I love finding a great writer with backstories to keep me going until their next hits the stands. Sisters is an excellent tale, very witty in places and sad in others, about the obsession of the 'other woman' wife number two about wife number one. We cannot even name these two ladies, but we know them down to their roots before this tale is over. An excellent read, easily digested and something I am happy to recommend to family and friends. I will want to read this novel again in winter when this farmer has the time to savor each word.

The writing is beautiful and lyrical. However, this reader could not appreciate the scattered chatter of the narrator: just streams-and streams- of conscience. The storyline is easy to see, and beautifully written, of the narrator obsessed with her husband's first wife. There is no "fatal attraction" thriller here, just an excellent character study of the narrator's mind. I didn't relate.

What a delightful book. It was different from what I usually read and that was what I needed. Highly recommend. Just a lovely book

My view

I read this " novella " in one sitting. It felt as if the author was taking notes, preparing for a novel. The characters are one dimensional, we never get to know them fully. Long annotations fill the pages never or little corresponds to the story line.
The end reads like a comedy punch line, the only paragraph I found of interest.
I could not recommend this novella.

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this arc.

This brilliantly crafted novella's patina of simplicity will suck you in. Very few words but many layers. Told from the perspective of a second wife obsessed with the first, we're immersed in a sampling of serial monogamy and all that goes with it.

We never learn either the ex-wife or the new wife’s name, but somehow, in just a few pages, we understand these women intimately. The new wife is obsessed with the ex, beginning with a photograph of her pushing an old black pram and walking a black and white terrier while she was still married to her husband and they lived in France. When the new wife has insomnia, she counts the number of times she, the ex-wife, and her husband made love. The new wife is so obsessed, she begins shopping in the same Manhattan grocery store where she shops. Surprisingly, since she’s nearly 40, employed and seemingly has a life of her own, she goes to phone booths, calls the ex-wife, and hangs up. The story gets progressively creepier when she begins taking French lessons because she, too, wants to go to France.

But by the time her obsession has hit full throttle, we sense something is not right with the marriage. After all, the new wife met her husband while he was still married. After they married, he called out his ex-wife’s name while they made love. He danced with his ex at his daughter’s wedding while his new wife pouted at a separate table, hardly an appropriate way to treat your spouse. He came home from business trips tired and hung over. He even called out another woman’s name in his sleep.

She becomes friendly with her husband’s two children, a son and a daughter. They wish her a happy 40th birthday.

But nothing prepares us for her 40th birthday celebration. Some of the beautifully-written paragraphs seem out of context until, bam, the night of her birthday arrives. So that’s where that other part of the story was headed. Now we get it. But we don’t see it coming.

The prose is engaging. The timing is nice. The story is interspersed with some mathematical theory of Hermann Grassmann and interesting accounts of the pianist and conductor Seymour Lipkin that become relevant at the end of the story.

Tuck puts an odd spin on the universal theme of infidelity. Obsession is universal, too, but we usually think of it as pining over a lover. Obsessing over an ex-wife exists but no one talks about it. Here, the obsession over an ex-wife is split open for all to examine in gut-wrenching detail. It’s not much different from a lover’s obsession.

This book is somewhat confusing to me. It seemed to flit from one subject to another in random thoughts, although I did like the writing. Some of the descriptions of music or art are beautifully written. This is a very short book about a second wife and her insecurities - always comparing herself to the first wife and seeming to fall short. This is most liking true of most second wives, especially when there are children involved as there are here. The ending is truly an end - I'm also sure this happens sometimes.

Thanks to Lily Tuck and Grove Atlantic through NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I just couldn't get into this. The narrator didn't work for me.

Good short - I enjoyed it, in fact I kept returning to it amongst my chores until I abandoned them and sat with it till I finished.

Whilst reading I had some doubt about the title, if it is appropriate? But when I finished I thought yes, it fits, it more than fits, Tuck made it fit beautifully.

They were sisters, at least according to the narrator's perspective, in fact they had a lot in common according to that perspective of course. I like how Tuck uncovered our protagonist layer by layer even by her choice of quotes or books she is talking about or say the missing pills. She gives us clues, layers, all so quietly, seamlessly sown in. All in a world shrinking bit by bit to contain just them two.

Somehow setting aside a very concrete doubt about obsessiveness, I'd say that they'd have a good relationship where it ever to happen.

This is the first time I read Lily Tuck, and this was a good introduction.

I liked how the author portrayed the narrator, who is very curious about her new husband's previous love life, especially with his ex, to the point of being obsessed with her. I also did not see that end coming.

This was a fast read and I really enjoyed it. Will look for more by this author.

"Sister" was my introduction to Lily Tuck. I loved this brief novel, which feels much more like a short story belonging in a collection. When I reached the end, I wished for another one. It reminds me of Lorrie Moore's amazing short stories and those found in "No One Belongs Here More Than You" by Miranda July.

The narrator is her husband's second wife. The focus is on what it's like to join a family after another woman has left, but remains a part of everyone's life (as a mother and a co-parent) except the narrator's. She is constantly wondering about the first wife and marriage and how she and her marriage measure up.

The novel is dark, modern, and a little funny. Tuck's writing forces you to read between the lines, but in doing so you find a full story. Without much history, I completely understood the second wife's feelings of insecurity, jealousy, and curiosity about the previous wife and marriage. Some of the references were over my head, but I caught the apt Manderly mention referring to "Rebecca", a classic novel all about the first wife. This is a quick read, but don't breeze through it or you'll miss all the subtle, implied content. FIve stars - I'm looking forward to reading Tuck's other works.

Very confusing. I quite like Lily Tuck, but this book...

3.5 because very original, but cannot round up.

This is a very slight volume. And, most of the pages have only a paragraph so it's a very fast read.

As noted--Tuck portrays married life: "...exposing the intricacies and scandals of a new marriage sprung from betrayal. Tuck's unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the unbanishable presence of his first wife--known only as she."

And so it goes, there's she and her. Flat. Cold. Much lying and deceit.

I enjoyed the only instance of humor, an exchange between the narrator, her husband, and their housecleaner, Margarita.

Numerous references to Mario Vargas Llosa and Vaclav Havel; both of whom I have read.

So proceed, but not sure how to tell one what to expect.


GraphREADING PROGRESS

It barely took me an hour to read "Sisters", Lily Tuck's latest novel (novella? short story?) . Written in brief paragraphs, smoothly flowing in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, it makes for an entertaining and deceptively easy read. In reality, there is so much that is subtly suggested and cunningly implied, that it packs in its few pages the effect of a novel thrice its length.

The unnamed narrator's marriage is haunted by the presence of her new husband's first wife - ominously referred to throughout as she - whom he divorced to marry the narrator. After some initial awkwardness, the narrator manages to maintain a decent relationship with her husband's son and daughter and, to a lesser extent, also with she/her. But we soon learn that beneath the genteel veneer, there is a lurking obsession, an all-consuming jealousy.

The bare bones of the plot will inevitably draw comparisons with Du Maurier's Rebecca, as both the author and her erudite narrator are very much aware. Indeed, there are knowing references to Du Maurier's novel which are quickly turned on their head ("I dreamed - not that I went back to Manderley - that I was in a big city..."). Similarly, that novel's dark, Gothic atmosphere is replaced by a different sort of darkness - the darkness of black humour and biting satire, as we witness the making and unmaking of a contemporary marriage. Brilliant, witty stuff; sparkling like the champagne which propels the book to its denouement.

This is a devious little book--really more of a novella--that reads like a modern-day Canterbury tale, interspersed with odd bits of trivia and tangential research (tulips, the wives of Vaclav Havel, the work of Mario Vargas Llosa). The nameless narrator relates her uneasy fixation with her husband's first wife in a manner that is both matter-of-fact and ominous, recounting her own bad behavior and the layout of a Greenwich Village apartment with the same sort of half-desperate, half-bloodless tone. A tiny gem.

Excellent story! Looking forward to reading more by this author! Highly recommend!

A very short story narrated by a woman who has just married and lives with her husband and his two children from a previous marriage. It tells of the marriage, his ex wife and the narrator's relationship with her step children. There are lies and infidelity. The story of the marriage is an easy quick read.

This was the first work by Lily Tuck I read. It moved quickly and strangely. I did enjoy it but I think it is an acquired taste. It was quirky but well written and a quick read. I thought it would be something completely different but I was not disappointed. I enjoyed this.

The remarkable flow of this fascinating short novel is mesmerizing. A difficult proposition if forced to put it down., and rare in the book-reading business. A writer who knows words and what they do, who thinks about the many questions posed in life, and one who examines them with courage and relentless charm. Lily Tuck is a great choice to spend extended time with.

I first heard of Lily Tuck in a fiction-writing class Gordon Lish was conducting during the summer of 1995 in Bloomington, Indiana. Tuck was another of the many writers Lish had acquired in his stable as editor for seventeen years at Alfred Knopf. But in class he championed loudly the skills of Lily Tuck and brought her to the attention of perhaps hundreds of his students. And because there were so many writers the great Lish published in his tenure at Knopf, and for the most part commercial failures amounting to a high percentage, Tuck has gone basically unnoticed by the mainstream, even though she won the coveted 2004 National Book Award in fiction for her novel The News from Paraguay. Her first book, published by Lish, Interviewing Matisse or the Woman Who Died Standing Up, remains on my shelf, still unread after two previous false starts. But after reading Sisters I am intent now on a sufficiently renewed attack on those pages as soon as possible. Tuck is sophisticated, and obviously born of that class, based on her range of knowledge of the cultural elite.

Few writers can make you feel you are with them in the room. Intimately. Lily Tuck employs with her voice several anecdotal references to expensive tastes. With the ear of a classic composer, she plays her song adroitly, and disregarding the consequences of infidelities, makes them all feel worth it.

A very fast and entertaining book. There seemed to be not much of a plot so you couldn't tell what was really happening. I really liked it tho. Surely kept you guessing!