The Sleeping Sisters
A Novel
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The Sleeping Sisters
Narrated by:
EJ Lavery
Pre-order Now for £14.64
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Narrated by:
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EJ Lavery
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By:
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Jennifer Givhan
Summary
A mother’s love is the oldest curse
Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that’s stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family’s violent legacy isn’t so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again.
Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades chasing the ghosts of her murdered cousins—alongside the memory of the other women she couldn’t avenge. When a new body turns up in Fortuna’s backyard, both women are pulled into a dangerous, ancient plot. Are the Sleeping Sisters awakening—or has someone in Fortuna’s family set a trap?
Inspired by true events and shot through with a Chicana-Indigenous reimagining of the legend of the headless woman, The Sleeping Sisters is a fevered, feral hymn to motherhood and the monstrous bargains we make to protect those we love.
“House of Spirits meets The Wire in this marvelously strange story of murder and motherhood; a gloriously surreal novel in which magical realism meets police procedural. Jenn Givhan twists your brain and leaves you looking at the world differently for a long time afterward. I have no idea how to describe what I just read, but it was really, really cool.” —T. Kingfisher, author of What Moves the Dead
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Critic reviews
“House of Spirits meets The Wire in this marvelously strange story of murder and motherhood; a gloriously surreal novel in which magical realism meets police procedural. Jenn Givhan twists your brain and leaves you looking at the world differently for a long time afterward. I have no idea how to describe what I just read, but it was really, really cool.”—T. Kingfisher, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of What Moves the Dead
“A gorgeously written mystery that kept me up at night and left me thinking of its characters in the days to come. It’s everything I love in a novel — a wily mystery, blood-stirring Indigenous folklore, and complicated ties to land and family. I devoured this novel; I was swept along pages brimming with suspense, where no one is who they seem. The Sleeping Sisters has a permanent space on my bookshelf!”—Laurie L. Dove, author of Mask of the Deer Woman
“Jennifer Givhan’s The Sleeping Sisters is as brutal as it is beautiful. When teenage girls are found decapitated in Albuquerque, one mother begins to fear the violence haunting her community may be rooted in her own bloodline. What unfolds is part crime novel, part fever dream, part reckoning with inherited trauma and religious hypocrisy. Givhan writes with a raw, lyrical intensity most writers spend a lifetime trying to unlock, turning myth and memory into something sharp, unsettling, and, at times, devastating. This is a bold, haunting novel about generational violence and the women who refuse to stay buried." —Carter Wilson, USA Today bestselling author of Tell Me What You Did
"The sun-drenched brutality of Jennifer Givhan's The Sleeping Sisters burns right through its readers' retinas, blinding in its savage humanity and voracious heartache. This haunting elegy to twice told tales—and our mothers who tell them—is absolutely volcanic, ready to erupt on your bookshelf if you don't read it straight away."—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“The Sleeping Sisters is cataclysmic. Givhan’s thunderous voice will break you open and etch itself into your bones. This book is an enthralling and ferocious page-turner with lyrical prose that interweaves gripping tension with the visceral ache of motherhood.”—Rios de la Luz, author of Itzá
"A chilling exploration of motherhood, murder, grief, and deep secrets, this book further solidifies Jennifer Givhan's place amongst contemporary literary greats. Simply put: The Sleeping Sisters is a masterpiece of Southwestern Gothic fiction."—Pedro Iniguez, author of Fever Dreams of a Parasite
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