The Sisters Mortland

by: Sally Beauman

Published by: Warner Books

Reviewed by Andrea Sisco

Sally Beauman, author of The Sisters Mortland, weaves a fascinating and haunting story of love, secrets and grief mixed with a high level of intrigue. Her prose is taut with information carefully doled out throughout the story.

It is 1967 in Suffolk, England where we meet the sisters Mortland. Julie is beautiful, Finn is the intellectual, and 13 year-old Maisie is odd. They live with their mother Stella and grandfather in a crumbling medieval abbey where the nuns of an early era haunt the strange Maisie.

Lucas, a young artist in residence, is commissioned to paint the sisters. Along with Daniel (a local man with gypsy blood) who is a friend of the sisters, and Nick Marlow, a medical student, they all spend a tumultuous summer embroiled in life and love with Maisie as the observer and narrator in the first part of the book.

Lucas' painting captures the essence of the sisters and is completed right before a horrific tragedy occurs at the abbey. Some twenty years later, that painting has become famous and is shown at a retrospective. As Daniel narrates this portion of the book, we see his deterioration as a result of his obsession with the people and the events of that 1967 summer.

Following other catastrophic events that impact the novel's characters, Julie becomes the third narrator and fills in the missing pieces to this unsettling story.

Beauman's The Sisters Mortland, is a beautifully written, powerful and deeply moving story of an impoverished English family and the people whose lives are intermingled with theirs. The reader will be torn between the desire to read quickly in order to learn how it all ends--and to read each sentences slowly in order to savor the words.

Armchair Interviews says: The Sisters Morland is breathtaking and is highly recommended.