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Publication Date: 14 August 2025
Format: Paperback
Extent: 256 pp
Our Price: 10.99
ISBN: 9780857309242
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Publication Date:7 August 2025
Format: ebook(ePub)
Our Price: 6.99
ISBN: 9780857309259
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SHRED SISTERS
Betsy Lerner
No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place - first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships - every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love.
PRESS REVIEWS FOR Shred Sisters
'Accomplished... A poignantly engrossing tale for anyone caught in the webs of sibling rivalry'
- Financial Times
'A sensitive exploration of loving someone with mental health issues, with characters you'll fall for'
- Good Housekeeping
'A deft and touching slow telling of family dynamics and the complexity of sisterhood'
- Sainsbury's Magazine (Book Club Choice)
'Lerner... is incapable of writing an unnecessary sentence'
- Daily Mail
'Tackles sisterhood and mental illness with wry style... Lerner is loath to waste a single word, and the characterisation's more intensely rendered for that. It's a tragicomic, wise, emotionally complicated domestic novel that also immerses the reader in the shortcomings of period psychiatry'
- Sydney Morning Herald
'I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck'
- Patti Smith, author of Just Kids
'Lerner has created a richly layered family novel that manages to be raucously funny, insightful, and tender... I will be thinking about the Shred Sisters for a long time'
- Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of Good Company
'A brilliantly written, emotionally gripping saga that delves into the complexity of sisterhood, mental health, and resilience... One of the best books I've read in years'
- Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist
'A bildungsroman overcast with the thick and inconstant cloud of mental illness... Lots of ambitious books announce themselves; this one doesn't need to... The prose is controlled, but neither virtuosic nor spare; the plot, enticing but neither Dickensian nor minimalist. Decidedly un-trendy, crescendo-less and restrained, this tragicomic family saga is a Bach prelude to the Rachmaninoff of a writer like Jonathan Franzen'
- New York Times
'Shred Sisters is the kind of novel readers won't want to end... Its bright, clean, gallivanting story rewards an open mind and heart with crisp prose, fresh plot turns and dimensional, dishy portraits we can instantly recognize'
- Washington Post
'This absorbing novel follows the sisters into adulthood with insight, humor, rue and love'
- Good Housekeeping
'Modest moments become revelatory in the wry and incisive Shred Sisters'
- NPR
'This heartfelt novel reveals the power of the sibling bond to shape our lives'
- People