THE STORIES Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud. "Sisters", her second novel, is a gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale. July and September, the siblings of the title, and their mother Sheela have left Oxford for a remote rented house on the Yorkshire moors, driven to a new life by a shadowy event for which July blames herself. That incident hovers over the novel, adding a layer of menace to the ominous atmosphere of the family's new home. Ominous, too, is Sheela's retreat to her bedroom; she emerges only at night, otherwise leaving her daughters to their own devices-which, in practice, means leaving September in charge of July.
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