Sisterly Love

Sisterly Love is about the unique bonds of sisterhood and depicts eras and places as seen through the lives of two sisters as they come and go at will in each other's lives, following a need to relate their memories or explore their present.

This is not a story with its conventional beginning, middle and end, although all that does happen in it.  So there is a story-line, but it is not conventionally told.

The story of their lives begins in the early years of the twentieth century with the usual sibling rivalries and disputes exaggerated by the presence of an obnoxious aunt and we revisit them from time to time.starting in the nineteen thirties. Elsie typifies the solid, conservative, hard-working office girl. Lillian shifts with ease from one boyfriend to another, from one husband to another, from one boss to another, from one country to another, yet she always returns to take refuge by either Elsie's or Horace's (their young brother's) home fires. By dint of Lillian's wanderings, the novel moves from London to an English country village, to South Africa, to Australia, to Spain, back to London, all vividly evoked through reminiscence.

It is loneliness in their advancing years which forces them into each other's company, despite themselves. It is the sadness of having nothing else in life which inevitably flings them against one another painfully peeling away the layers of their past existences and forcing them to surrender themselves to the irritating state of undesired dependence.

It is the inescapable pathos of two lives reduced by the passing years to grumpy proximity in a small bed-sitter that breathes life into Sisterly Love. .. My aim was to write about how youth transforms into old age with a certain humour, sadness and sensitivity.     D.H. Madrid, 2019