Esther Freud's new novel, "My Sister and Other Lovers", is out now and she will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 21 August.
Little House on the Prairie
This was read to me as a child. I loved the idea that the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, was the same Laura we were meeting as "Half Pint", and I was intrigued to think she was seeing her life in terms of a story, just as I was seeing mine. I can still remember sitting wedged in beside my sister, my heart thumping when Laura's own sister falls ill with scarlet fever.
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Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell, 1936
I was a late reader and by the time I did learn (aged ten), I was hungry for any available book. That's how I found myself so caught by this sweeping saga that when selfish, headstrong Scarlett sets her sights on her quieter, plainer sister's fiancé, and takes him for herself, I threw the book across the room, only to have to doggedly retrieve it.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868
I loved the depiction of the March sisters and their different, often clashing, personalities. Who was I in relation to Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy? Which most reflected my siblings? Much as I adored it, I took against "Good Wives" with a violence that has made me wary of sequels to this day.
Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker, 1962
This is a brilliantly dark description of the bond, and the efforts to maintain it, of one half of a pair of twins. Cassandra is a divisive and unreliable narrator, posing the question: do we need to be on the side of our main character?
Sorrow and Bliss
Meg Mason, 2020
The sister relationship in this novel is not just witty and full of affection, but provides the thread between tormented, childless Martha and practical, mother-of-four Ingrid. Their bond is one of the many highlights of a moving and deeply funny book.
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Who were the ‘weekend snipers’ of Sarajevo?Under the Radar Italian authorities launch investigation into allegations far-right gun enthusiasts paid to travel to Bosnian capital and shoot civilians ‘for fun’ during the four-year siege
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‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
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6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
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Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
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The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
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Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
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Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
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The dazzling coral gardens of Raja AmpatThe Week Recommends Region of Indonesia is home to perhaps the planet’s most photogenic archipelago
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Salted caramel and chocolate tart recipeThe Week Recommends Delicious dessert can be made with any biscuits you fancy
