A Sister in My House

February 15, 2018
Two semiestranged sisters spend a few days together in Sweden-born Olsson's (The Memory of Love, 2011, etc.) latest minimalist, meditative novel involving women sharing secrets.Emma, 42, belatedly accepts a two-year-old invitation from her older sister Maria, 48, to visit her in Spain. Maria made the offer in their native Sweden in a moment of unexpected (and short-lived) happiness after their mother's funeral. Now Maria, who narrates the novel, is vexed to have her self-imposed solitary life in her bay-view cottage interrupted and wonders how she and Emma will fill their time together. She feels she has never really known Emma. Although they lived together until Maria left home, Emma had a different father. The sister Maria truly loved was her identical twin, Amanda, whose immediate and continuing affection for Emma as a baby and small child made Maria jealous: "I did not want to share Amanda with Emma." Maria, who never married and has always been self-supporting and independent, has always assumed that stay-at-home Emma, who raised her two children in a lovely home with her husband, Olof, has had an easier life. So it is a surprise when Emma tearfully announces that Olof has left her and admits that she feels she has "drifted along aimlessly." With her cigarettes and bitten-down nails, Emma is not the sunny, carefree woman Maria expected. Wearing her pain more openly, she is the instigator asking questions as the women begin to share the particulars of their lives and their very different views of their childhood, their parents, and each other. In formally polite conversation structured around small moments--drinking coffee, sharing meals, taking a boat excursion with Maria's artist neighbor--the sisters circle closer, finally able to confront the great loss that shaped each of them. Allowing herself to care for her sister, Maria also finally faces the regrets, grief, and loneliness she has avoided.The spare understatement and constricted focus can feel suffocating at times, but this story of sisterly ambivalence--and love--rings movingly true.

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February 19, 2018
Using spare prose and keen insight, Olsson (Astrid & Veronika) explores how two estranged sisters come together and face difficult elements of their shared past. Maria, the narrator, lives in the small Spanish town of Cadequés, where she had planned to move with her lover, Maya, from nearby Barcelona, until Maya died in a car accident. Nearly a year after the accident, Maria’s younger half-sister, Emma, comes to visit, accepting an invitation made two years prior at their mother’s funeral. Their relationship has numerous complications, including the fact that Emma’s husband, Olof, who has just left her, was Maria’s boyfriend and lover first. As each day passes, the sisters, awkward at first, become more comfortable in each other’s company; they reveal their darkest secrets and enlighten one another about their disparate perceptions of their troubled childhoods and who they have become as adults. The sisters’ relationship is ultimately (and satisfyingly) transformed, as are their self-understandings, clarified by the outside perspectives they give each other. While the author solidly explores each sister’s distinct arc, an underlying lack of heart and depth undermines the power of the story.

March 1, 2018
Four years have passed since, at their mother's funeral, Maria invited younger sister Emma to visit her in Spain. Now Emma has sent word from Sweden that she is taking Maria up on her offer. This isn't exactly welcome news. The sisters have never been close, and Maria has gotten used to being alone in the too-big house she rents in Cadaqu�s. By nature unable to share and adrift after a shattering loss, she resents the way Emma intrudes on her life and takes up space in her house, her buffer against the outside world. Swedish author Olsson's (The Memory of Love, 2013) novel unfolds mostly in conversations between the two sisters. They are wary at first, but as they talk, they chip away at decades of accumulated misperception, heartbreak, and guilt to reveal the sources of their deepest scars, an emotionally distant mother, and the early death of a third sister, Maria's twin. With its psychological insight, pared-down prose, and irresistible setting, the novel will appeal to readers interested in exploring international women-centered fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)