The best books about siblings who help each other to evolve

Set in Japan in the period just before World War II, this is the story of Sachiko and her three sisters.

Yukiko is in need of a husband, but she is stiff in her old-fashioned habits. Taeko, by contrast, is a rebel who sleeps with men and becomes pregnant. Sachiko, modeled by Tanizaki on his pretty and spirited wife, loves all of her sisters and feels responsible for them.

I found the picture of the sisters’ daily life, which was by turns cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern, fascinating in its detail. One thing follows another, open-ended, surprising, and completely authentic in feel. I cannot recommend this book enough!

This book quickly became my favorite novel by Woolf, perhaps because it depicts a large Victorian family over time.

When her mother dies, Eleanor keeps the home fires burning for her siblings, Morris in the law courts, Edward at Oxford, Delia, Milly, and the younger Martin and Rose. We watch them grow and, fifty years later, deduce what has become of their lives when they talk to each other at a party.

Woolf’s narrative sweeps across England, across London, giving us vignettes of her characters from which the reader must make up the whole. My copy of this book is tattered from re-reading. I loved following along with Woolf’s attempt to gather everything she knew into her story of the Pargiter family.

Though they may have been rivals as children, Laura and Mary depend upon each other as they grow older.

When Mary becomes blind, Laura learns to describe what she sees to her. Laura also works hard at difficult jobs in order to help her parents send Mary to a school where she can learn Braille and to take care of herself. In this particular book, Laura also stands up to a teacher who is bullying her younger sister, Carrie.

I first read the series of books about the pioneering Ingalls family as they came out with Garth Williams’ illustrations in the 1950s. With simple, direct American prose, it was these books which whetted my appetite for realistic fiction. They bear re-reading as an adult.

In this first of Jane Austen’s novels, she takes up the problem which young women faced in the England of the early 19th century.

They were quite dependent on men, but wished to marry men to whom they were attracted. Elinor and Marianne do find these men, but both are thwarted in their relationships. Elinor helps Marianne see that her love interest is a cad, but she can do nothing about her own love for Edward, until he loses his inheritance.

Austen’s precise description and storytelling are always a joy. I have recently been surprised to learn how wide her world was, with brothers in the navy and a cousin born in India and married into French aristocracy. If you haven’t time to read the book, these sisters have been beautifully animated in a movie of the same name directed by Ang Lee, with a script by Emma Thompson.

In this fictional representation of her own childhood in a blended family, Patchett shows how miserable the children were, but also the odd partnerships and roles they set up between themselves. Showing us both how their parents’ lives got tangled, and how the five remaining children interacted in later life, Patchett tells a tale of an American era.

I loved this book for its precision in both external details and the aching truths of how the characters feel. In refusing to ignore the cruelty of the children and the indifference of the parents, Patchett gets it right. But she also describes the aftermath of a tragedy which does not, quite, tear a family apart.