This giveaway promotion expired on May 30, 2011.
“I remember vividly the Sunday I said I was going to write a novel,” says bestselling author Rosamund Lupton. “There was a story I wanted to tell. I wasn’t sure yet how the plot would work, but I knew that it would be about two sisters. I had already imagined the older sister — starchy, uptight — and the phone call she gets in the middle of Sunday lunch saying that her younger sister — scruffy, an art student — had gone missing.”
We’re thrilled to share this page-turning, powerful novel with you! A thrilling story of fierce love between siblings, Sister is a suspenseful and accomplished debut with a stunning twist. Dip into the excerpt below and you’ll see why Sister became an instant bestseller in the U.K. “The first time I saw my name next to Stieg Larsson,” Rosamund Lupton recalls, “I laughed. It was just so incredible.”
For more of the inspiring story of how she came to write Sister, read this article by Rosamund Lupton in the Daily Mail and this interview with Rosamund Lupton in Publishers Weekly.
Sister by Rosamund Lupton – Excerpt
Rosamund Lupton read English Literature at Cambridge University. After a variety of jobs in London, including copywriting and reviewing for the Literary Review, she was a winner of Carlton Television’s new writers’ competition and was selected by the BBC for a place on their new writers’ course. She was also invited to join the Royal Court Theatre’s writers group. Before becoming a novelist, she was a script-writer for television and film, writing original screenplays. She lives in London with her husband, two children and Tango, a large ginger cat.
Visit Rosamund on RosamundLupton.com and learn about her top 10 favorite books.
This book looks amazing! Can’t wait to read it!
Looking forward to it!
Looks really good, cant wait to read it!
Really want to read this one!
This looks like the kind of book I could really get into! Can’t wait to read it!
This story sounds very good – suspenseful
I have 4 sisters and I want this book!
I love suspense mysteries. This sounds like a good story line for a Law and Order episode. I would love a free book. I haven’t been fortunate enough to get one that I have submitted for yet. This could be it!!!!!!
Now wish I hadn’t read the preview – can’t wait for the rest.
I would love to read a story like this. I would even love it more to pass it on to my sister, my best friend. =)
Im so excited for this!
Sounds like an awfully good read !!
Reading is one of my favorite pastimes..I love it. I like trying different authors and different story types. Love to try this book this summer.
This sounds like a great book. I love crime fiction, and am intrigued to see how it meets literature in this book.
I would love to read this whole book this summer
i would like to read this book over the summer
Sounds riveting! Would love to add it to my summer beach read list!
Being a younger sister myself I feel like I can relate to these characters to the T. I am very interested in seeing how this story progresses.
sounds like a great read!!
Sounds like a great story, I’d love to share it with my sister.
I look forward to reading the rest of the book.
love to get this
SOUNDS GREAT!
I would love to win this book and share it with my sister! I’m sure it could only make our relationship stronger!
Sister sounds like a very interesting book, can’t wait to pick up my copy.
sounds great. thank you
Sounds like an amazing read! great for sitting out by the pool.
Would love to read this book!!
Can’t wait for a new great read!
Oh my goodness… I would stay up throughout the night reading this book if it where here with me~~ The first 20 pages have me on the edge of my seat!
This looks like a book I could curl up with and not stop reading until I reached the back cover!
I’d love the chance to do just that!
Love to read and free books are even better. Like to find new authors so i love giveaways.
love to discover new authors
Sounds Like a Great Read!!!
Look forward to this book. My family is made up of mostly woman and sisters is a bond that holds us together through tough times no matter how different we are all – we are unique.
I would love to read this book.
Love reading, can’t wait…
Would love to read this
I would love to read this book! The synopsis has already drawn me in!
Wow! What a read!
Reading is my life. Please send me a copy of this book
I truly hope i get a chance to read this book !
Sounds like a good read, can’t wait!
Can’t wait to read this book. I always look for different kinds of books that veer off from my normal Inspriational fiction that I read. I love to read so this gives me an opprotunity to branch out and read books from different authors.
Cannot wait to read it.
Cant wait to read!!!!!1
cANT WAIT TO READ IT!!!
The excerpt from her book has me hooked…
I would love to share this intriguing book
with my older sister!
Many thanks, Cindi
Can’t wait to read this – sounds very interesting
I have a sister and I love mysteries!
Utterly fascinated by the excerpt I read. Can’t wait for the book!
What a great read!
Sounds like a great book
This looks like a great read!
This looks like a good read!
Looks like a must read to me!
Since the tale of Abel and Cain people have been fascinated by sibling adventures. I can’t wait to read this account.
Sounds like a good read!
sounds great!
Can’t wait to read it…!!!
I just received a copy of the book and started reading the first 30 pages. I like it so far and I think I am going to blog about it when I finish!
This looks like a great summer read!
I loved this novel. I have a younger sister and am a mom of two daughters that are 5 years apart. The love between Beatrice and Tess is so tangible. It had me guessing until the end and then a double twist. I hope this is not Rosamund Lupton’s only novel. I would love to read her next one! I could not put it down. Thank you Read-It-Forward for an excellent and free book!
My review: Bee learns of her sister Tess’ death. Th police say it was a suicide, but Bee believes it was murder. The book follows Bee’s journey to the truth – as she stumbles through her own sorrow and fears.
This deeply moving novel was also unbearably sad. Bee’s journey to find out the truth behind her sisters death moves from past to present seamlessly. The characters are well developed – particularly Bee, her sister, her sister’s friend – the very pregnant Kasia, and the mysterious and kindly Mr. Wright. But even the briefly met characters were well drawn.
I don’t want to spoil the book’s plot, but I will say the ending was a surprise, yet made perfect sense.
As much as I enjoyed the book, I also had to set it aside for a few days about midway through – the sorrow in the writing was just too overwhelming. Clearly the author is no stranger to loss. I would go so far as to say this is the closest account of how it really feels to lose someone close to you. I was reminded over and over of my own losses, and had to step away a bit for my own sense of well being. Frankly, nature seems to create a buffer to great sorrow with time and this book wiped away my buffers. I do think a few light moments would have relieved the almost too heavy feel of the novel.
Overall, a deeply affecting and well written tale that takes the reader step by step through one sister’s journey to find the truth and to find forgiveness.
WARNING! SPOILER ALERT.
As I finished reading the novel, I could not help but envied the close relationship between Beatrice and Tess. I have a sister eight years my junior. Similar to Beatrice and Tess, we share minutiae of our life with each other. Still, I wonder if I know my sister as well as Beatrice did Tess to the point that I can be certain whether she would have taken specific action when all evidences seem to be counting against it. I admire the love between Beatrice and Tess as much as I do Lupton’s ability to convey it through her writing. For a debut novel, I think Lupton did a good job capturing and keeping readers’ attention all along although her work might not suit people who like action-packed stories.
One lesson I learned from the novel is that we should not judge people based on their look. I know it sounds like a cliché but it is very true. Often times, we made mistakes because we misjudged people. In Sister, Beatrice didn’t take Kasia seriously in the beginning because Kasia looked like a prostitute with her cheap clothes and makeup. The police didn’t believe Tess was murdered because they stereotyped a young art student who had an illegitimate child to be a drug taker. Beatrice early on dismissed her suspect of Dr. Saunders, who turned out to be the murderer, because he was too charming and handsome to be a criminal. These misjudgments, along with numerous others in the novel, led Beatrice and even us readers to incorrect assumptions.
It was interesting to see how Beatrice’s suspicions went from one person or subject to the next and how the ending took her (and many readers) by surprise. The only complaint I have about the novel is that the ending seemed a little too abrupt and it left me a feeling that the author was trying to cramp most of Beatrice’s reflections and/or realizations in the last few pages. Nonetheless, it was a good book and I would like to thank Random House’s Read It Forward program for sending me this nice piece of work.
Written in the form of a letter to the narrator’s missing sister, Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel Sister is wonderfully written and very captivating. It works remarkably well on two separate levels. On the one hand, the book is a solid, fascinating thriller which kept me hooked as I tried to unearth the mystery. On the other, it is a beautiful, touching account of loss and the bonds of sisterhood and family.
The narrator is Beatrice or ‘Bee’, who is living in New York, with a steady corporate job and an organized life. She receives a call from her mother in England advising her that her free-spirited younger sister Tess is missing. She immediately returns home and begins to try to trace Tess’ whereabouts. When Tess is found dead, the police are convinced that she committed suicide, using the ‘facts’ of her life (artist, unmarried, pregnant, possibly depressed) as substantiation for their belief. Bee however, is just as certain that Tess would never take her own life – citing her sister’s reverence for life and the bond between them as her evidence.
In effect, no one believes Bee – not the police, her boyfriend or even her own mother. As she comes up against the wall of their disbelief, Bee works harder and harder to find proof that Tess was murdered. Much of the conflict of the book comes from this determination, as Bee struggles against both the doubts piled up by everyone connected with the case, as well as against the things she thought she knew about her sister’s life. In the end, Bee discovers that she wasn’t wrong about the bond that existed between them. Instead she finds that she had looked at Tess’ life as though it were the counterpoint of her own, and had judged her accordingly. In the process of understanding her sister’s life and death, Bee rediscovers her true self along the way.
In order to find the evidence to support her conviction that Tess was murdered, Bee pretty much steps into Tess’ life – living in her apartment, taking a job that she’d once held, visiting the people and places that had been important to her, even wearing her sister’s clothes. These actions both allow Bee to understand her sister much more and also lead her to suspect several different people who were part of Tess’ life. Raising these multiple suspicions to the police, Bee appears to have become even more unstable, with almost everyone thinking that she is becoming unhinged by her sister’s death. Bee is written so believably however, that it was clear to me from the beginning that there was much more to Tess’ death, and I found myself rooting for her to find the truth.
The best thing about the book for me though, was that just when I thought I understood where the story was going – though not how it would end – the author slipped in an unexpected twist. This little gem was what elevated ‘Sister’ from being a well-written thriller to being a stunning, captivating book that resonated with me and one that I will be hard-pressed to forget. The book is fast-paced, but the author’s elegant writing style keeps it from feeling rushed. I must admit, I hurried through the last third of the book, when it became apparent that Bee had been keeping something important back from the story she was telling her sister. Revelations follow one after the other in this last section of the book and both the suspense and the language made for an enjoyable and satisfying read right down to the very last page.
This book was a fantastic read – well written and suspenseful. It was hard to put down. The main characters were so well-developed that they made you care about them.
I love the journey of self-realization that Bee went through. She discovered more about her sister, but she also discovered the things that really mattered in her life. The learned that maturity and success, as measured by societal norms (a job that pays well, nice clothes) are not necessarily what makes a person feel fulfilled.
from the first word I was entranced by Beatrice Hemming’s letter to her younger sister Tess as she recalls the story of Tess’s disappearance.
Rosamund Lupton tells a compelling story. She captures the sentiments of an older sister’s feelings for her younger sibling. I still can’t decide if the reason I was so completely enthralled with the story was because Lupton expressed Bee’s feelings as an older sister so succinctly or because I imagined my younger sister reading this and understanding how it is to be the oldest.
What a powerful story of the bonds of sisterhood!
First: I have to admit I moved a few months ago so I was unforgivably late in reading this book. But when I started last night, I never put it down.
Full of suspense : yes. Compelling : yes. And when I thought I had figured out the “twist”, it twisted one last time and left me with my mouth hanging open and tears running down my cheeks. Nicely done indeed.
Wasn’t sure if I would like this, but totally got caught up in it! Really didn’t want it to end and was twisted up in it as others have stated! Passed it on to two friends after I finished. they loved reading it also. Thanks!
Wow, RIFers, Rosamund Lupton is a new RIF favorite! Thank you for all your thoughtful reviews. We’re so glad you’re here. Keep these reviews coming!
Really want to read this one and Afterwards…love these kinds of books