Sisters
DAISY JOHNSON
(JONATHAN CAPE, 192 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064

Two years ago, with her mind-­bogglingly brilliant retelling of the Oedipus myth, Everything Under, Daisy Johnson became the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She has two gifts not often bestowed on the same writer: she can pace a narrative as scarily and surprisingly as any airport thriller-writer; she can also write like an angel, evoking sights and smells, changes in the weather, the landscape inside your head. She is one of the best describers of what it is like to inhabit a human body – rather a basic thing, but most writers do not bother to do this.

Just as I was shuddering with fear, with the girls in the remote farmhouse, with smelly, small animals scuttering through the dusty, shadowy wainscoting, and thinking I was in Stephen King country, she evoked the history of their house, and of the landscape in which it is built, with all the lyricism of Virginia Woolf’s similar trick in To the Lighthouse.