We Could Be Rats

Sigrid works at the Dollar Pal and hates it. She never finished high school, because she has always refused the trappings of adult life. She would rather wander the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the one person who has ever understood her.

Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated that Sigrid cannot fit into polite society. Beneath the detachment, though, Sigrid carries real hurt and sensitivity. As a child she pretended her parents were swamp monsters whenever their violent arguments shook the floorboards. Now she is losing Greta's friendship to the opioid epidemic tearing through the town.

Margit sets out to understand her sister and the secrets Sigrid keeps. Each sister, in her own time and her own way, comes to see that the game they shared as children, the imagination they once lived in, offers the only route forward.

This is literary fiction about two sisters who could hardly be more different, with a warm, tender tone and an affection for childhood running through it. It treats addiction, family violence and the pull of adulthood seriously, and it centres on the bond between the sisters rather than on plot twists.