My Other Sister
My Other Sister
Sara PabornA hauntingly beautiful novel of sisterhood, family secrets, and open wounds
In a weather-worn house on the Swedish coast, a woman begins to unravel the mystery of her family’s past. It might be time to finally confront the long-buried story of her two older sisters: the radiant, inseparable duo Diana and Susanne, the latter long estranged and now living a shadowy life in Florence. In the summer of 1979, the sisters travelled together. Only one of them came home. The rupture that followed devasted the family—and was never fully explained. Through fragments of childhood memories, unearthed letters, cassette tapes, and old paintings, the narrator begins to piece together the story she has spent her life orbiting but never understood. What emerges is a tale of fierce love and betrayal, the inherited weight of silence, and the impossible longing to repair what was once sacred.
Set between sun-drenched Italian streets and the coastal light of southern Sweden, My Other Sister is a deeply atmospheric novel about the invisible bonds between siblings, and the fragile constellation of memory and identity. Reminiscent of the visually excellent scenery from ‘Call me by your name’, this is a balancing act between urgency and emotion, similar to Sigrid Rausing’s ‘Mayhem: A Memoir’. Paborn masterfully evokes a child’s sense of awe and dread, a woman’s reckoning with the past, and the seismic echoes of choices made decades ago.
Sara Paborn writes with poetic clarity and emotional precision. Her prose glows with sensory detail, laced with wit, vulnerability, and a keen eye for the strange, unspoken tensions that define families.
