My Sister and Other Lovers

Reviewed by Olivia Ackers

Esther Freud (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: 2025) 

This book serves as a follow-up to her first book, Hideous Kinky, and explores childhood, identity and the sisterhood between Lucy and Bea, as well as betrayal and love. The book also looks at how motherhood and the impact of parenting can shape individuals. How motherhood (and what would’ve been) plays into this book, especially as it leads up to the end of the first half and the start of the second. The relationship between parent and mother is explored throughout this novel, using the characters as a mouthpiece and an avenue for this theme’s interpretation. 

Bea and Lucy are finding their feet, stumbling their way through life, making mistake after mistake, and having terrible (and traumatic) experiences: abusive boyfriends, abortions, drugs, alcohol, to name a few. They find that through all of this, their bonds of sisterhood are being tested. The question at the centre of this novel is whether they can heal from their past (or at least challenge it), to be able to grow together, or whether examining the damage of the past will only cause more. With this in mind, please note that many triggering topics are explored in this book, so please do look into potentially harmful content if you are somebody that needs to know the material in a book beforehand.

Freud’s writing in this novel captures the messiness that is left behind by scars that are not fully healed: how people can hurt those they love the hardest, and how fractured family bonds themselves leave unhidden marks that can show themselves in times of hardship. How these people get caught in troubling situations that are hard to escape, how they are manipulated when feeling vulnerable, and how this can cause trauma itself.

For the full experience of this novel, it would probably be best to read Hideous Kinky first, which I did not realise until after reading this new book, but I believe it would provide a fuller context to why the characters act the way they do. I’m sure when we have the event with Esther Freud, we will hear all about the construction of the narrative, the characterisation, and the choices Freud made, how the characters have changed and developed in the thirty years since the release of the first novel, and how this may have shifted over time. 

Esther Freud will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event on Thursday the 10th of December 2026.

You can buy tickets on the website here: Esther Freud | Suffolk Book League