Two Sisters comes thirty years after the publication of Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? This account of the relationship between a bluff, domineering yet loving Yorkshire GP and his bolshy, bookish son, and of the physical details of his father’s death (it should have been called ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father’s Penis?’ one critic wagged), is often credited with being a founding text of ‘family lit’. It was followed, nine years later, by Things My Mother Never Told Me, a very different sort of memoir based on a cache of letters exchanged between the author’s parents. Morrison discovered the sacrifices his mother had made to marry his father and cast a wavering retrospective light on her apparent complaisance in the face of her husband’s dalliance with ‘Auntie Beaty’, as described in the first book. Even if he had known more about his mother’s repressed early life when he wrote the first book, it seems Morrison would not have included the details there. The living have no place in the stories of the dead: ‘You can’t write an honest memoir when the subject is alive. At any rate I can’t. Death is the only permission.’

Two Sisters is a loose meditation on the bond – or lack of one – between siblings who grow up into very different lives. The title is somewhat misleading. Morrison was brought up with one sister, Gill, close in age but little else, and the memoir is mainly an account of Gill’s difficulties and descent into alcoholism and blindness. The second sister of the title is only found out to be a sister shortly before her sudden, unhappy death. Morrison’s suspicion that Auntie Beaty’s daughter Josie is in fact another sibling runs through the books about both his father and mother, and in them his enquiries are met with blank denials. A DNA test eventually established the facts, giving rise to a despair that Morrison doesn’t attempt to explain. How much of Josie’s life is known to the author remains unclear. The story of the DNA test and Josie’s death reads like a coda to the riddle running through the earlier books.

Morrison’s account of how and when things went wrong for Gill is tentative and guilt-ridden. The brother and sister were first divided by the eleven-plus, with Blake making it to grammar school and Gill being sent to a boarding school wrongly assumed to be a gentle option. Was