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Book Summary and Reviews of The Sisters Antipodes by Jane Alison

The Sisters Antipodes by Jane Alison

The Sisters Antipodes

by Jane Alison

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  • Published:
  • Mar 2009, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The Sisters Antipodes is a unique window on the intimate devastations of family betrayal, in equal measure unsettling and engrossing.

When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls, the younger two—one of them Jane—sharing a birthday.

With so much in common, the two families became almost instantly inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners—divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed.Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a "silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, silently fissuring." And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of silent combat for the affections of their absent fathers—a contest that, as this gorgeous, piercing memoir recounts, would prove tragic.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. An incomparable personal story exquisitely, stunningly told." - Kirkus Reviews.

"Alison masterfully delineates the treacherous forms this jealousy would take, especially amid the sexual self-abnegation of adolescence, in a truly unusual, harrowing journey of identity." - Publishers Weekly.

"Literary memoir fans will be drawn to this searing but redeeming story." - Library Journal.

This information about The Sisters Antipodes was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Jane Alison

Jane Alison is the author of three novels, The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, and Natives and Exotics. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

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