Sisters

- Four inseparable sisters are torn asunder by the secrets they’ve been keeping, and their decisions to reveal them, in Telling Libby by Anne Fine.

- Before she was Helen of Troy she was one of the Daughters of Sparta, the younger and very beautiful sister to Klytemnestra; the debut novel by Claire Heywood reimagines and reclaims the classical story, in which their golden childhood precedes adult lives of blood, devastation and enormous sorrow.

- Jane Austen’s Bennet sisters might present the full range of temperament and virtue in Pride and Prejudice, but it’s Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility who demonstrate most powerfully the bonds and tensions of sisterhood.

- Two generations of identical twin sisters feature in Audrey Niffenegger’s ghost novel Her Fearful Symmetry, lives and selves intertwined, though not always harmoniously or happily.

- The Price family travel to the Congo as missionaries in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; their four daughters narrate the story of their adjustment to African village life amidst the political turmoil of the 1960s.

- In the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue, Neasden, Georgia and Bessi carve out a haven for two, while below them their Nigerian mother battles a desperate homesickness, in the delightful 26a by Diana Evans.

- Set in Nigeria before and during a vicious civil war, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features two sisters whose lives are shaped by forces beyond their control.

- One sister embraces her psychic abilities while the other denies them, in Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld.

- A haphazard upbringing binds sisters Ruth and Lucille closely together in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

- Iris and Laura grow up motherless, their lives forever intertwined with tragic results in Margaret Atwood’s cleverly nested tale, The Blind Assassin.

- Sibling rivalry turns Machiavellian in the Binewski carnival family, touring the backwaters of America and featuring the Siamese twins Iphy and Elly, in Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.