![]() ![]() You’ve got to take whatever shit, whatever rubbish comes your way. Talking to Richard Lea in The Guardian Braithwaite says that her own responsibilities as the first-born were impressed on her at an early age and that, as an older sibling, she was brought up to understand the responsibility Korede feels to look after Ayoola – remembering how her own mother once told her that as the big sister she had to be “like a dustbin. Her objective, she says, is to explore the ties of love and loyalty between the sisters, both the formation of their relationship in a childhood spent with a violent and capricious father, and the testing of their bond as Ayoola’s impulsive violence becomes increasingly out of control. Like Adrian McKinty in The Chain, Braithwaite confronts us with the question of how far we would go to protect those we love. He was over six feet tall and she must have looked like a doll to him, with her small frame, long eyelashes and rosy, full lips.”īraithwaite says in her interview with The LA Review of Books that when she was writing the novel the sisters came to her first, and that the rest grew out of their relationship: “Once I understood who they were to one another, it was left for me to imagine why they were that way, how much of who they were was genetic and how much was as a result of what they had been through.” ![]() She didn’t mean to kill him she wanted to warn him off, but he wasn’t scared of her weapon. You never knew with men, they wanted what they wanted when they wanted it. (But why was she carrying the knife?) The knife was for her protection. He was angry, screaming at her, his onion-stained breath hot against her face. “On their one-month anniversary, she stabbed him in the bathroom of his apartment. Korede has committed herself to concealing from public view the violent realities of her sister’s romantic entanglements: We see the events of the novel from her point of view – the observer whose complicity lies in getting out the bleach, disposing of bodies, or simply torching the scene of the crime. Her elder sister, Korede, a hard-working nurse, understands her responsibility with an unfailing if sometimes weary devotion. She has no shortage of young men who are in love with her but they all seem to find it exceptionally difficult to master the art of keeping her happy. The events of the novel are driven by the actions of Ayoola, a beautiful, self-centred young woman. ![]() Oyinkan Braithwaite’s widely acclaimed debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is a fast-paced, sharply observed, often darkly humorous portrait of the complex, protective relationship between two sisters, one of whom has the unfortunate habit of ending relationships by killing her boyfriends. ![]()
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