Daisy Johnson

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The Hotel

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Everything Under

A BBC Between the Covers Big Jubilee Read Pick

The Sea, The Sea (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

Sisters

A short, sharp explosion of a gothic thriller whose tension ratchets up and up to an ending of extraordinary lyricism and virtuosity.

Observer *Fiction to Look Out for in 2020*

A haunting, emotionally acute novel with a terrific twist.

[A] gothic masterpiece... You can't stop reading... This taut, lyrical firecracker of a book crescendos into an emotional ambush of a climax, which...confirms Johnson as a profoundly inventive and masterful storyteller.

A tour-de-force... Johnson's prose seduces us with the promise of comfort and then yanks that comfort away.

Exhilarating... A masterful follow up to her debut, Johnson's novel is quietly terrifying and certainly an apt read for 2020.

Daisy Johnson is the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King... Readers will find many pieces of treasure buried here... Terrifically well-crafted, psychologically complex and chillingly twisted.

A second novel that should see [Johnson] consolidate her grip on power... A book less likely to chew you up than screw you up.

A short, sharp shock of a book... Johnson's lyrical prose and knack for conjuring unsettling moments makes for an impressive read. Sisters will, I suspect, be a big hit.

The creeping, physical menace that made Johnson's debut so memorable commands this book, too... It makes an immediate impression -- there's a weight to it which doesn't shift when you put it down.

A dark, slippery, psychological, gothic horror tale...with a rhythmic, visceral energy.

The stories Daisy Johnson tells are at once heart-rending and hair-raising. Her prose is elegantly emotional; her plotting would make Shirley Jackson, a master of upmarket horror, proud. Sisters, her second novel, is a gripping, if nightmare-inducing, tale.

[Johnson] 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... I guarantee that once you start this novella, the world will be dead to you until it is finished. And when it is finished, the world will have changed.

Daisy Johnson's extraordinary second novel, Sisters, a short, sharp virtuoso tale of literary horror with a stop-you-in-your-tracks ending that casts the entire novel in a different light.

An uncanny, Gothic tale... Deeply unnerving and unnervingly prescient.

Johnson uses words like some artists use paint, saturating her sentences with images and sensations in ways that lend a delirious, sensorial quality to her writing, yet which can also have an enervating impact on the actual plot. But just when you wonder where this hallucinatory novel is going, Johnson beautifully wrong-foots you with a shivery denouement that makes the ghosts in her story all too real.

This is the second novel from super-talented Johnson, who made headlines as the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, and is written in poetic, haunting prose to be savoured slowly.

One of the rare novels that balances an almost-uncomfortable level of tension with gloriously stylish prose throughout. There's an element of escapism in the profoundly creepy, and the masterful claustrophobia of Sisters will deliver you from your own.

A blistering read. An exquisitely rendered exploration of sibling love and rivalry that rattles the core

I LOVE THIS BOOK! Explosive, dark, weird and utterly compelling... There are few writers as talented as Daisy. After reading Sisters, I binged on Fen and Everything Under and am now obsessed

Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

This is a book that makes you remember why you first fell in love with reading. I was haunted by it. Utterly unique.

Daisy Johnson is one of the best writers in this country ... an astonishing stylist. Sisters is a thumping good book, haunting, visceral and potent.

Max Porter, author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Daisy Johnson is an enchantress who can turn the day into night and back again in a sentence. I love her prose so much, and this book was the sibling love-and-horror story of my dreams and nightmares.

A taut, disturbing, and brilliantly written psychological drama of the first order. You'll read for the quality of the prose, but also the amazing depth of characterization and mystery. Another great book from one of our finest writers.

Sisters has a hot, dark energy that thrums beneath the language like blood. Daisy Johnson’s portrayal of female relationships is sticky, close and true. It will seep into your skin and linger in your bones.

Johnson’s Sisters is haunted in the fullest sense; its very sentences governed by a sinister, spectral force. This is a novel we don’t so much read as wade through with our hands outstretched and our eyes clamped shut, holding our breath 'til morning.

Sue Rainsford, author of Follow Me to the Ground

Sisters is brilliant. Bold and tender. There is a physicality to its spell, muttered sometimes, sometimes screamed: we can empty of ourselves and become an object, while objects can flush with life. Daisy Johnson is a profound writer.

A beautiful, burning, disquieting marvel.

Very much for the gothic lovers amongst us and those that crave psychological suspense… [Sisters] has been compared to the likes of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier… This weaving of women’s bodies, sex, sisterhood with the physical world reminded me a lot of surrealist works by the likes of Dorothea Tanning and Frida Kahlo. Intriguing and a novel that stands out in its originality.

Johnson returns with a well-crafted, consistently surprising psychological thriller... When the revelations hit, they are intensely powerful. Readers of classic gothic fiction will find a contemporary master of the craft here.

Johnson-whose first novel, Everything Under (2018), made her the youngest author ever shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-brings her nuanced sense of menace and intimate understanding of the perils of loving too much to this latest entry in her developing canon of dark places where the unspeakable speaks and speaks. A subtle book that brings to bear all its author's prodigious skill. A must-read.

A novel about family facing their darkest impulses while quarantined together? Highly relatable.

A brilliant portrayal of love and complex family relationships, with all the features of a Gothic mystery.

A lushly written, psychologically suspenseful narrative that's not easily forgotten.

A darkly disquieting thriller... The descriptions are vivid enough to stop you in your tracks, and the narrative draws to a psychologically apt conclusion.

A multi-dimensional shocker, where everything is not as clear cut as it initially seems, leading to a devastating conclusion. Fans of the darker and more mysteriously menacing work of Stephen King or the contemporary horror of Andrew Michael Hurley will adore Sisters.

Johnson has cultivated a striking style with recurring images and themes... [her] stories contain minimal dialogue and very little straightforward narration. They are instead characterised by the accumulation of sensory detail, the gradual revealing of character, and a building sense of dread.

Johnson pulls off a great feat in this book. We are propelled by her story, even while we barely know what it is; absorbed by characters at once abstract yet fully drawn. She allows just enough clarity to pierce through, like flashes of an image amid white noise, until finally we can grasp and appreciate the whole picture that has so thrillingly eluded us.

Sisters echoes Brontë's Wuthering Heights not only in its gothic elements and sombre descriptions of English landscapes but also in the idea of doomed love, love which becomes an omnipotent, harmful power... Sisters is chilling and unrestful in a way many horror stories aren't, the world of the novel itself a disturbing and anxious place.

An absorbing tale of sibling love and envy.

It's hard to deny the uncanny thrill generated by Johnson's blend of horror, nature writing and magical realism... As dazzling as a photographer's flash.

The electrifying new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under

Sisters

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Daisy Johnson

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