Twins are everywhere in fiction at the moment, from Brit Bennett’s bestseller The Vanishing Half to Claire Fuller’s Costa award-winning Unsettled Ground. The challenge for any novelist, of course, is not merely to use twins as an off-the-peg plot device, but to capture the existential experience of growing up in exact parallel to a sibling, or, in the case of identical twins, being the genetic double of another human being. As a twin myself, I’d say Renée Branum’s riddling debut, Defenestrate, gets very close to a true depiction, as Marta and Nick attempt to individuate from each other – first in Prague, and then in a midwest hospital after Nick falls from a fifth-storey window.
Narrated in short, anecdotal chapters, Marta’s first-person account of the twins’ shared life is perceptive and witty. While the impetuous Nick is infatuated with Buster Keaton, a star who “spent his whole life falling”, Marta is gently protective of her brother, whose homosexuality outrages their “painfully devout” mother; a woman who writes out psalms on notes to place above the twins’ beds. Aware of the strangeness of their living together after college, Marta knows they are “buying ourselves some time” before their inevitable adult separation:
