Sisterland

Sisterland is Newbery’s most ambitious and complex novel to date. It opens with 16-year-old Hilly writing a letter to someone whom she misses so much it hurts and urging them to ‘Go carefully now. Mind the corners’. The quotation, one of her grandmother’s sayings, leads her to reflect on J B Priestley’s play Dangerous Corners which revolves around a pivotal moment when one can choose to move in one direction which leads to the difficult questions and disclosure of unsettling revelations or move safely in the other direction – a dangerous corner. Sisterland is about one such moment in Hilly’s life.

As with her previous novel The Shell House, Newbery explores the intertwining of the past and the present. When she gets Alzheimer’s disease, Hilly’s German grandmother Heidigran, moves in with her family. As the disease progresses and her mind becomes more muddled, secrets buried in her past start to emerge. The second time frame is set during and the immediate post WWII period: a young Jewish girl Sarah Reubens is transported for safety from Cologne to England. Sarah is the young Heidigran who has over the years developed her own racist agenda. Hilly’s growing love affair with a Palestinian boy Rashid further complicates the story.

Newbery explores with great sensitivity displacement, alienation, belonging and racism, skilfully pulling together the ideological issues with the personal story. She writes convincingly and tenderly about adolescent love. At times the issues seem too large for exploration in one novel but Sisterland will repay a second reading.