Shred Sisters
A Novel
On Sale: 10/01/2024
Shred Sisters
A Novel
On Sale: 10/01/2024
Format:
About the Book
No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
"I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck." - Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train
From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters
It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place-first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships-every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
Critical Praise
“I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck.” — Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train
“Betsy Lerner has created a richly layered family novel that manages to be raucously funny, insightful, and tender—often on the same page. I’m not sure how she did it, but I gleefully went along for the ride and was bereft when it was over. I will be thinking about the Shred Sisters for a long time.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest
“Shred Sisters is a brilliantly written, emotionally gripping saga that delves into the complexity of sisterhood, mental health, and resilience. Spanning decades, this utterly engrossing novel asks readers many profound and pressing questions: Can we fully know the ones we love? Does love always require self-sacrifice? Can we understand ourselves without understanding our family? One of the best books I’ve read in years.”
— Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty
“I loved this poignant story of a younger sister growing and forming herself around her older sister’s erratic behavior. Betsy Lerner articulates moments I have observed but never put into words, and I both laughed out loud and was deeply moved. A brilliant novel.” — Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point
“Wise to the woe and wonder of families and the bedeviling forces that shape them, Betsy Lerner’s masterful new novel, Shred Sisters, delivers you through grief and devastation toward tremulous, exquisite hope.”
— Bill Clegg, author of Did You Ever Have a Family
“Betsy Lerner’s Shred Sisters is a cocktail of raw poetry, needle sharp insights, and propulsive, almost projectile honesty. I can’t get over how deftly it pivots from funny to mean to vulnerable to wise, often on a single page. Lerner explores the contours of complicated relationships with an intoxicating ferocity that—we come to realize—amounts to no less than an act of love.”
— Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins and To & Fro
“Deliciously compelling, as poignant as it is funny, and sneakily profound about the myriad ways family shapes and undoes us, Shred Sisters will take over your mind and heart (and life!) until the very last page.” — Edan Lepucki, author of California and Time’s Mouth
“The Shreds are in devastating and hilarious pain. Betsy Lerner has turned her memoirist’s eye on a fictional family with candid and surprising results.”
— Jill Eisenstadt, author of From Rockaway and Swell
“Engaging and thoughtful….A seamlessly constructed and absorbing fictional world, full of insight about how families work.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Moving...quietly lovely and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a complicated family.” — Publishers Weekly
-Product Details
- ISBN: 9781443474986
- ISBN 10: 1443474983
- Imprint: HarperCollins Publishers
- On Sale: 10/01/2024
- Pages: 272
- List Price:25.99 CAD
- BISAC1 : FICTION / Family Life / Siblings
- BISAC2 : FICTION / Contemporary Women
- BISAC3 : FICTION / Literary