On a mountainside in the French Alps, 50-year-old Lucie is reunited with her twin sister, Clémence. The twins aren’t alike: Lucie has turned the family barn into a gîte; Clémence had disappeared from the family home for 30 years, delving into drugs, prostitution and run-ins with the gendarmerie. In 2056, when this novel is set, climate change has ravaged global communities. The gîte is under threat from a water pocket in the mountain’s glacier. Should it burst through, it will destroy the converted barn and the village below, just like the catastrophe of over one hundred years prior.
The sisters were always treated differently. Lucie was nurtured. Clémence was neglected. Lucie began to fear her, and that fear reemerges after her twin’s return. This psychological tension builds as the narrative progresses and Lucie questions Clémence’s intentions. Clémence and the glacier share enough features to be the same character in different forms: both are brooding, unpredictable and volatile, and – as tension escalates – Lucie’s very survival is at the mercy of their capricious moods. There’s a longstanding good twin/evil twin trope. It’s conceivable that the twins are simply polar versions within the one character. The ultimate convention for this scenario is that one twin must not survive.
The effects of global warming are well imagined, but this is perhaps tangential. Despite the enhanced threat of the glacier’s water pocket, the narrative drive is delivered by the friction between the sisters. My Sister is an excellently written psychological thriller laid upon a substrate of an eco-dystopia, where human and environmental elements are as dangerous as each other.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prize-winning author Emmanuelle Salasc (formerly Pagano) was born in 1969 and lives in south-east France. She has written fifteen novels.
One Day I’ll Tell You Everything, published by Text, won the European Prize for Literature and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Faces on the Tip of My Tongue was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines.
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