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SISTERS

I ONCE went to Vietnam with a friend who racked up hundreds of pounds in mobile phone charges talking to her twin sister.

Yes, twins are the original special relationship, but nonetheless, as the younger sister of two brothers, I found such an ardour for sibling connectivity exotically baffling.

My brothers and I operate on a strictly need-to-know basis. When we talk it is often to confirm meetings or flowers that need to be sent to our mother, to flag up a calamity or pin down more complex matters.

Calls ‘just for a chat’ are rare. The women I know who only have sisters seem more continually — if, at times, complicatedly — involved.

As it is in life, so it is in fiction. One breakthrough international hit of the past year has been the provocatively titled My Sister, The Serial Killer, by the young Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite.

Set in modern-day Lagos, this is the story of reliable nurse Korede and her beautiful younger sister Ayoola. Men swarm like flies around Ayoola, but when she swats them away, her older, frumpier sister has to tidy up the mess. Will Korede be so accommodating when a colleague she admires falls for Ayoola?

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo is a moving, involving study of modern family and sisterhood. David and Marilyn Sorenson are a comfortably off Chicago couple who fell head-over-heels in the 1970s, then had four daughters, Wendy, Violet, Liza and Grace.

The book opens on the idyllic backyard wedding of Wendy in 2000. But spool forward 16 years, and events set in motion that day threaten to blow the pressure-cooker tensions between the four highly strung girls to smithereens.

Jane Austen, a devoted sibling herself, was the genius behind some of the best-loved sister acts in English literature. In Sense And Sensibility, she gives us Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Elinor may judge her sister’s rash behaviour, but her devotion is unwavering.

As the old music-hall song goes: ‘Sisters, Sisters. There were never such devoted sisters... All kinds of weather, we stick together.’