"My sister the serial killer" by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for fiction and long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.

"Ayola summons me with these words - Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again."

It is the last word on this, the first page, that hooks. This is not the first killing. And thus the book immediately lives up to the promise of its title.

Korede immediately hurries over to the flat with bleach to clear the mess and to help her sister remove the corpse.

Korede is a nurse, the elder sister, practical and efficient but not blessed with beauty. Ayola is stunningly attractive, full of a beauty that makes normal sane rational men become obsessed. The two sisters were physically abused by their bullying father, almost as a by-product of his making a fortune (he is contemplating exploiting Ayola's beauty in the marriage market for his own financial gain when he dies). He has bequeathed to Ayola a knife with which she dispatches her boyfriends. Then, one day, the handsome doctor for whom Korede lusts, meets Ayola and falls under her spell. Should Korede denounce her sister to save the doctor's life?

A book whose theme is the unfairness of genetics in a world where the beautiful always get more than their fair share of everything. Korede has learned to be cynical about a cynical world where the cops are always open to bribery, where men are invariably predatory ("When you have money, university girls are to men what plankton is to a whale." p 107), where you have to play dirty to survive. In some ways Ayola is the supreme feminist, exploiting her beauty on Instagram, and ruthlessly murdering boyfriends when she is tired of them ... and Korede's protective instincts help her little sister get away with murder. But how long can this last before it all comes tumbling down?

Some great lines:

• "It takes a whole lot longer to dispose of a body than to dispose of a soul." (p 10)
• "It was a shame to think that death would whittle away at his broad shoulders and concave abs, until he was nothing more than bone." (p 10)
• "He had hoped his generous act and his artistic talents would secure him a place in her heart, or at the very least a place in her bed, but he was short and had teeth that were fighting for space in his mouth. So all it got him was a pat on the head and a can of coke."
• "She is beached on the sofa in the downstairs living room, reading a Mills & Boon novel - a tale of the type of love she has never known." (p 41)
• "When he is not singing, he is humming, and when he tires of that, he whistles. He is a walking music box." (p 46)
• "Her mother twists her wedding ring with her finger, as though contemplating taking it off." (p 49)
• "Chichi will spread the news before I have finished telling it." (p 73)
• "I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass." (p 82)
• "He had several girlfriends in various universities across Lagos. ... He once told me you had to feed the cow before you slaughtered it." (p 107)

A fast-paced (tiny chapters) but beautifully written novel.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

August 2017; 223 pages

A review by  Nic James for Thanet Writers makes some interesting points: "Korede’s need to protect her sister is such a compulsion that I wanted some more exploration of exactly why she continued to act in such a way for a person who clearly cared about no one but herself." He also suggested that the narrator had "very few endearing qualities. Her crush on Tade seemed pretty shallow, and her inner monologue was full of constant scorn for the people around her. As a result it was difficult to care about either sister."