Sisters is a fever dream of a novel. It is the story of siblings July and August who have left Oxford with their mother, Sheela, to escape something horrible that has happened there. They’ve gone to the crumbling Settle House, a dwelling owned by their deceased father’s sister.

The house is here, squatting like a child by the small slate wall, the empty sheep field behind pitted with old excrement, thornbushes tall as a person. […] The white walls of the house are streaked with mud handprints and sag from their wrinkled middles, the top floor sunk down onto the bottom like a hand curved over a fist.

July, the younger of the two sisters, is the main narrator of this story. Their mother, a children’s book author and illustrator, rarely says anything, although one part of the novel does provide us a glimpse into her life with the girls’ father. Mostly, though, she “has been this way, taciturn or silent, ever since what happened at school.”

The “what happened” at school is the “mystery” – I did guess one thing, although not the specifics. What separates Daisy Johnson’s novels from other stories is the writing, which is innovative and compelling. It’s a gauzy, disconcerting narrative and it is almost impossible to feel as though your feet are on firm ground.

This the year we are houses, lights on in every window, doors that won’t quite shut. When one of us speaks we both feel the words moving on our tongues. When one of us eats we both feel the food slipping down our gullets. It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.

Sisters is a gripping book and reminded me a little of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.