On the first morning of their holiday together in a remote part of Scotland, 42-year-old Sarah convinces her younger sister, Juliette, to clamber on to the roof of their mobile home for a better phone signal. Juliette has three layers of tinfoil wrapped around her limbs and a tinfoil cone hat plonked on her head before she clocks that she’s fallen for a prank. It’s a pleasing bit of sibling slapstick in Slags, the new novel from Emma Jane Unsworth about desire, dissatisfaction and the ferocious loyalty of sisters. And sisterhood, as Unsworth writes it here, is an unbreakable connection for which no prank antenna is needed.
When Sarah takes Juliette on a Highland road trip for her birthday they find themselves revealing secrets and reckoning with their younger selves. Candid and comic, Slags is Thelma & Louise with a campervan and without a clifftop. There are shades of Fleabag, too, in the fractious sisters, the sexual escapades of one countered by the suburban righteousness of the other.
