Set across Paris, LA, London and New York, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors is about four very different sisters, one of whom (Nicky) has recently died in an accident. Each chapter follows a different remaining sister (Avery, Bonnie, Lucky) as they grapple with grief and self-destructive behaviours. A year after Nicky’s death the sisters meet up in New York City when their parents have decided to sell Nicky’s apartment.

Barely perceptibly, unnoticed by anyone else, they leaned toward each other, like plants for whom the other was the sun.

The remaining sisters are between mid twenties and mid thirties. Each leads a very different life. Avery the oldest is a former addict turned corporate lawyer married to a woman who was her therapist. Bonnie is a champion boxer working as a bouncer in Los Angeles and in love with her boxing coach though neither have acknowledge this. Lucky the youngest has been a model since she was fifteen and lives the party life in Paris. The deceased sister Nicky was a Manhattan high school English teacher who longed to become a mother but died from an overdose of painkillers taken to try and manage very painful endometriosis. 

The trick to loving Lucky, Bonnie wanted to tell Avery, was to respect her need to be free. Let her come and go as she pleased and eventually, she would land on you

Avery’s carefully managed life starts to crack under the strain of her grief.  Lucky’s drug fuelled party life leaves her feeling more and more isolated. Bonnie takes out her grief fuelled rage on a racist patron at the bar she works at.

None of us really know what another is going through until that person feels able to share the truth of their lived experience.

As the story unfolds family and sibling dynamics and triggers and their influence on shaping character are gradually unveiled. This forms the spine of the novel which shows how these dynamics impact day to day life of each of the sisters in their relationships with each other and their relationships with other people. There is a great Freudian tension throughout. 

Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.

Themes in Blue Sisters include grief, sibling relationships and the impact of addiction in families. The prose is beautiful, rich and visceral and the characterisation is an excellent driver of tension throughout. Blue Sisters is a great read even for someone who doesn’t have sisters.

Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.