The Good Sister

Fern Castle has built a life she can manage. She works at her local library, keeps to a careful routine, and relies on her twin sister Rose to help her navigate a world that is often too loud, too bright and too unpredictable. Fern knows she is different, and she knows how much she owes Rose, who has protected her since childhood.

So when Fern learns that Rose desperately wants a baby and cannot have one, she sees a way to finally repay a lifetime of care: she will have a child for her sister. But stepping outside her safe, ordered boundaries — meeting a gently unconventional man named Wally, questioning what she has always been told — forces Fern to look more closely at the family history she has never allowed herself to examine.

Narrated in Fern's singular voice and set against the pages of Rose's private journal, The Good Sister is a tender, tightly wound novel about loyalty, memory and the difference between being protected and being controlled. Sally Hepworth writes one of her most disarming narrators, then slowly reveals how differently two sisters can remember the same past.