My Sister, the Serial Killer

"Well, this is a book with such an engaging title that you immediately pick it up and start reading. There’s a striking opening scene where the narrator, Korede, is cleaning a bathroom and complaining in a matter-of-fact tone that the hardest place to scrub clean of blood is where the shower and caulking join… it’s not what you expect from an opening scene! But the thing I liked about this book most of all was the voice. It’s a first person narrative where you really get a sense of her coming through in the language she uses, the way she speaks, and the way she takes us through her story. There are times when she’s impatient. There are times when she’s forbearing. There are times when she’s frightened. There are times when she’s annoyed with people. You get the whole range of human responses as the book progresses, and you feel very much that you’re seeing the world through a distinct viewpoint. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s also a great story. On the face of it, it’s a tense crime thriller: you’ve got Korede’s sister, Ayoola, killing the men she has relationships with – and even by the end, you’re not quite sure what the outcome’s going to be for either sister in the long term. There’s a tension all the way through: are they going to be caught out? Are they going to make it? And, is the next boyfriend going to be killed? So there are all the tense moments you associate with the crime novel: the jeopardy, the fear, the horror. But underneath that, My Sister, the Serial Killer is a novel of relationships. It’s about family. It’s about the relationships between the two siblings, and between them and their parents. Elements of the back story are hinted at, almost tangentially, as throwaway lines, and we have to colour in the rest. It’s a really interesting novel for those reasons. Often people who don’t read crime fiction just dismiss it as being formulaic and conventional – crammed between tramlines, just doing the same thing again and again. But then you read a book like this, and you understand what crime fiction can do at its best, the way it can deal with relationships and with wider society. “Read a book like this, and you understand what crime fiction can do at its best” In some ways, you’ve got a classic love triangle here: Korede and her sister Ayoola, and Ayoola going off with the man that Korede is in love with. And you have to think: is he going to survive this? But you’ve also got a portrait of life in Nigeria with modern-day Lagos front and centre. Oyinkan Braithwaite, I think, divides her time between London and Lagos, and she gives us a vivid picture of the city – the traffic jams, the corrupt cops, the rain that lashes down and breaks your umbrella. We get a real feeling for what Lagos is really like as a place to live, not least because she writes about it in a very taken-for-granted way. I’ve often been asked about writing books partly set in the past: how do you write historical fiction? I always say that you only mention things, like the make of car, or the way that something is done, if it’s actually what you would describe in a contemporary novel. Braithwaite does exactly that with the way she writes about Lagos; she writes about it the way that you’d write about London or Los Angeles, with the assumption that the reader understands how city life is. She tells us what we need to know, and then the other stuff just makes sense around that. Yes, she very much plays with our responses as readers, and we are rooting for Korede to make it out the other side, and not to have her heart broken, and not to have to do this all over again. But this is not a novel that gives us easy answers or happy endings. It’s a novel that leaves us with more questions than answers. One of the other things I was really impressed with is that there’s a sense of coming of age here. It’s a novel, very firmly set in an African country, that doesn’t feel obliged to shoulder that whole weight of the history of the colonial past. It just writes about the way it is here, now. It’s a story that, in a sense, could be set anywhere – and although it is very clear about where it is, and how it’s different from other places, it doesn’t do that retelling of the whole history of the nation, as it were. I understand why so much emerging fiction feels the need to work through that past. And writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie do it remarkably well. But there’s a sense of having arrived at a different place: ‘We don’t need to tell you about that stuff anymore. You should know that stuff by now.’"

"Sometimes, though, escapism is what’s called for. One of the most enjoyable books I read this year was Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister the Serial Killer , which Val McDermid also selected among her picks of the best crime fiction of 2019 . Set in Lagos, it follows hardworking nurse Korede as she attempts to cover up the crimes committed by her insatiable sister Ayoola, a beautiful sociopath with black widow tendencies. As well as a crime thriller, it’s a razor-sharp dissection of male-female dynamics that never feels preachy or pretentious. Semiosis , a first-contact novel, was an immersive and mind-expanding work of science fiction by Sue Burke. It follows several generations of humans as they start a colony on a new planet, where plants are the highest form of intelligent life. Strictly speaking, this is a 2018 book, but it came out in paperback this year and I heard about it when I interviewed the director of the the Arthur C Clarke Award about their 2019 shortlist. It’s been a regular bestseller at Five Books, and rightly so."