Rachel Joyce & Emily Howes
Sisters in Fiction
From the Bennets of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” and Louisa M Alcott’s March sisters in “Little Women”, to Cecilia and Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” and the Vignes twins in Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half”, female siblings are a feature of many beloved works of fiction.
To discuss the power and creative possibilities of the female sibling dynamic, we welcome two acclaimed novelists who have put sisters at the centre of their work.
Emily Howes is the author of “The Painter’s Daughters”. Winner of the Mslexia Novel competition and later selected for BBC Radio 2’s Book Club, this wonderful debut is a portrait of the relationship between Peggy and Molly, the two daughters of artist Thomas Gainsborough.
Rachel Joyce has written several bestselling novels including “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry”, “Miss Benson’s Beetle” and “Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North”. Her next novel, “The Homemade God” – published in April 2025 – is a story of three sisters and their brother as they gather at the family house in Italy’s Lake Orta after the death of their famous artist father.
Rachel will treat us to an exciting sneak preview of this new novel.