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“Everyone is very sure that Mary never tried to kill me,” says one of the protagonists of Sororicidal at the beginning of the book. “This is because Mary was always careful not to look as though she were trying to kill me.” The speaker here is Margot, Mary’s younger sister, and she is reflecting on her early childhood and the dangerous games they played, largely at Mary’s insistence.

The pair are in their early pubescence at the book’s opening, in 1915, growing up in a prosperous family on the outskirts of Adelaide. Mary is a gifted painter, and her creativity is encouraged by the girls’ parents, fuelling Margot’s mingled envy and admiration. Beside Mary, Margot feels lumpish, awkward and untalented, and decidedly overlooked. Margot and Mary exist almost entirely within a closed milieu – they have a governess, rather than attending the local school, and are largely left to their own devices by their parents, existing within a shared imaginative world that is intense and often tinged with danger.

Mary and Margot’s uncomfortable but essential dyad is soon threatened, however, by the burgeoning sexuality of both girls. Mary begins to compete with the girls’ mother, the flirtatious Mrs Cussens, for the interest and attention of their young and “vigorous” tennis tutor, Mr Dicker; Margot’s budding friendship with Nessy, the daughter of the family’s cook, develops into something deeply homoerotic, under the guise of a shared infatuation with Mr Dicker. In this charged atmosphere, the first of the novel’s violent and irrevocable betrayals takes place – and Margot feels herself annihilated.

What’s remarkable about Sororicidal is the completeness of the reversal that then takes place. Preston shifts narrators and elides at least a decade, and Mary’s voice, which takes up the narrative upon her return to Adelaide after an extended tour in Europe, is both startlingly different to Margot’s and utterly assured. Mary is, by her own account, “hot-blooded” where her sister runs cold; she has a sharp sense of humour, a keen sense of the aesthetic of her work, and is comfortable in her sexuality and desires. And it is now Mary who seeks her sister’s attention and affection, and Margot who withholds.

The pairing of Margot and Mary is a device with many precedents, especially in novels that explore some aspect of artistic temperament or drive. Most frequently, I found myself thinking of Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala, and its twin brothers Waldo and Arthur – one aesthetic, the other ascetic – who often personify the complex dynamic between impulse and discipline in creativity. All the more so because Preston’s previous novel, Bad Art Mother, is also fascinated by the potential for damage inherent in the pursuit of art and the sacrifices that such a life might entail.

But Preston’s book resists these simple delineations, in part because her characters, as women of their time, are more deeply affected by social expectations, more embroiled in family life; but also because neither Mary nor Margot is so clear-cut a counterpoint for her sister. For all her inhibitions, for example, Margot is deeply sensitive and sensual; Mary is far more careful with the feelings of others than she often appears. Instead, what Preston is interested in, in Sororicidal, is how much remains unshared between intimates: how many secret undercurrents run even through lives like Mary’s and Margot’s.

Sororicidal is told in four parts, each section switching between Margot and Mary as its narrator, and each following the women as they age. Preston is adept at capturing the intricacies and subtle shifts of the sisters’ emotional lives, upending, again and again, both what the reader thinks they know and where their sympathies might lie. Each shift in narration is an expansion and a complication, and always dexterously handled. Preston’s writing is lush, lyrical and darkly funny, and the complex psychic tension between the two sisters has a compulsive force across the novel.