Identical twins are always a source of fascination, and Jacqueline Roy’s novel charts the lives of a pair, Selina and Zora, who seem even closer than most. “We were joined at the hip – that’s not a metaphor,” insists Zora, in a striking first line; she claims to remember the operation that severed their tiny, conjoined bodies as babies. But separating herself emotionally from her sister in adulthood will prove more difficult.
Zora and Selina are born to a white mother and Black father in south London. We get two accounts of growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s, and the casual – and not-so-casual – racism their family faced. The twins experience a series of increasingly dramatic events, with twists and revelations that can feel a touch soapy. But the way personal traumas are bound up with racial and class prejudice forms a tight thread through the narrative.
