The Sisters K

“You’re my sister, but I’m not sure I love you. I’m not sure I love anyone. But if someone hurt you I’d want to kill him. I’d want him to die in pain. And he has hurt you … ” When Eugene Kim assembles his three estranged daughters at his deathbed, he means to put them to the test. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, he wants to test who will abject themselves for his favor—and, more importantly, his fortune. For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father’s cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism and dreams of motherhood, she sets to work on securing her inheritance, whatever the cost. To Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a knife, the money feels more like a trap: as Eugene’s unwilling favorite, his return to her life is to reckon with desperation. It is left to Esther, the youngest, with her need to find connection and do right by everyone, to illuminate the complicated love that binds them to each other. Each isolated and desperate to escape their circumstances, the sisters wrestle with the legacy of their abusive father as they attempt to imagine a future with others—colleagues, lovers, friends, family—as rage and shame courses through their blood. A modern reimagining of Dostoevsky’s dark classic The Brothers Karamazov, Maureen Sun’s debut novel is a vivid drama about what it is we owe each other, and ourselves, when vengeance is the only thing called for.