Brothers & Sisters

'Your brother or sister, it might be said, is your other self - your grander, sadder, braver, shrewder, uglier, slenderer self ... Your sibling is your most severe judge and your fiercest defender. You must always rescue them. They always abandon you ... You recognise one another, this is your relief and your ruin. They are your duty. They stun you with the sudden presence and force of their goodness. They give you Christmas presents that show you are strangers. You are strangers. You love them; it cannot be explained why or how.' - from the Introduction, Charlotte Wood
                                                               
Trespass and abandonment, old secrets and new truths, rivalry and protection, love and fear: twelve of Australia’s best writers tell surprising stories of the abiding bonds—bad, beautiful or broken— between brothers and sisters. Critics and readers alike have long commented on Charlotte Wood's acute ability to dissect sibling relationships in her novels. Lifelong resentments, tensions, alliances and affections between brothers and sisters play out in her books to brilliant effect. Here, Charlotte brings her skills to an anthology of newly-commissioned stories by well-known and new writers - Nam Le, Christos Tsiolkas, Tony Birch, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Robert Drewe, Ashley Hay, Cate Kennedy, Roger McDonald, Paddy O'Reilly, Virginia Peters, Michael Sala, Charlotte Wood - who have written about the sister/brother relationships, both in fictional and non-fictional forms.
"The rivalries and resentments and the powerful, persistent love show through each of these stories like a watermark." 
​
- Sydney Morning Herald
"A worthy collection to give as a gift to one who bears the unmistakably similar strands of DNA as yourself."

- The Courier Mail
​
'This little book is a keeper ... a volume of human stories, told in language as clear as stream water. "

- Cynthia Shearer
"These Australian voices have a similar notable quality: tough, open, sensitive, but not over-refined."
​
- The Age
It’s a measure of the strength of the form, and of the calibre of writers using it, that the writing is keen, sharp and challenging."

- Australian Bookseller & Publisher
The relationship between siblings  is impossibly complex ... This ambivalence is powerfully evoked in many of the stories in Brothers and Sisters."

​- Australian Literary Review

More by Charlotte Wood