Brothers and Sisters

A girl sneaks into her brothers’ rooms to rummage through their pockets while they’re out. A man boards a plane to attend his brother’s funeral. Another man’s brother comes home from jail, a young woman watches her sister embrace life and London while she is left behind, and two girls compete for the colour pink and their father’s love.

Trespass and abandonment, old secrets and new truths, rivalry and protection, love and fear: twelve of Australia’s best writers tell surprising stories of the abiding bonds—bad, beautiful or broken— between brothers and sisters.

Critics and readers alike have long commented on Charlotte Wood’s acute ability to dissect sibling relationships in her novels. Lifelong resentments, tensions, alliances and affections between brothers and sisters play out in her books to brilliant effect. Here, Wood brings her skills to an anthology of newly-commissioned stories by well-known and new writers – Nam Le, Christos Tsiolkas, Tony Birch, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Robert Drewe, Ashley Hay, Cate Kennedy, Roger McDonald, Paddy O’Reilly, Virginia Peters, Michael Sala and Wood herself – who have written about the sister/brother relationships, both in fictional and non-fictional forms.

• Year of Publication: 2009
• Genre: Literature
• Audience: Adult