Half-Life of a Stolen Sister

Dazzling in design, Cantor’s showstopping retelling of the lives of the Bronte sisters (and brother Branwell) gleefully shapeshifts the legends we think we know into an ingenious new context we’ve never imagined. Using emails, diaries, movies, radio programs and more, Cantor meshes facts with fictions to illuminate art, sisters, love, and life, and how creativity can arise out of soul-killing sorrows. Heart-wounding and deeply funny, Cantor’s novel’s exuberant risk-taking and bottomless compassion for her genius subjects make this book a work of genius in itself.

Rachel Cantor is among the most exciting, singular novelists of our time and Half-life of a Stolen Sister is her best yet.

I was entranced. Through Cantor’s virtuosic prose and empathic storytelling, I was drawn into the swirling drama and brilliance of this dysfunctional and ambitious family. I felt each death, each hurt, each creative triumph as my own. I became one of the Brontës. This hypnotic novel is a masterpiece.

Long a fan of Cantor’s breathtaking synthesis of intellectual brilliance and rare compassion, I am gobsmacked by this novel, and by the steadily building power of what the author herself calls its “eccentric form.” Playful, doleful, witty, tragic, loving; as a life is all of this at once, so is this magical volume. The Brontës deserve something extraordinary, and Rachel Cantor has given them – and us – exactly that. Bravo!

It’s exciting to think that the author of this book could follow it up with almost anything. Rachel Cantor is a writer to watch.