Well-born Mary and Margot are raised on a vineyard estate above Adelaide in the early years of the last century. Mary, brilliant and beautiful, dazzles all as her quiet, serious sister trails in her shadow. But Mary’s high-handed malice finds a match in Margot’s growing resentment at mistreatment; her revenge will be served at absolute zero. Set against a backdrop of privilege and propriety – and unfolding in an era of global conflict and radical new ideas about art and female agency – Sororicidal is an account of Edwardian-era sisterly love that mutates into a very modern tale of rivalry and betrayal. The polite cruelty of their childhood games becomes adult battles where the endgame is to split the nuclear family, releasing utter devastation. At once intimate and expansive, locally grounded and global in reach, Sororicidal is the story of womanhood across a convulsive century – and the ordinary lives of two sisters who remain inextricably linked across a lifetime: as mirrors, rivals, and executioners of one another’s dreams. It is a novel about the necessary and unendurable entanglements of family; the thin, volatile line between care and spite; and how love is a flame that both feeds and consumes.
