From her lookout in the crumbling mansion that was her childhood home, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to arrive. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left nearly fifty years ago; the reclusive Ginny has rarely ventured out, retreating into the precise routines that define her days, carrying on her father's solitary work studying moths.

As the sisters revisit their shared past, they realize that their recollections differ in essential and unsettling ways. Before long, the deeply buried resentments that have shaped both their lives rise to the surface, and Vivien's presence threatens to disrupt Ginny's carefully ordered world.

Told in Ginny's unforgettable voice, this subtle and chilling debut novel tells an extraordinary story of how families are capable of undoing themselves--especially in the name of love.

It's ten to two in the afternoon and I've been waiting for my little sister, Vivi, since one-thirty. She's finally coming home, at sixty-seven years old, after an absence of nearly fifty years.

I'm standing at a first-floor window, an arched stone one like you'd find in a church, my face close up to the diamond-shaped leaded panes, keeping lookout. For a moment I focus on the glass and catch the faint, honest reflection of my eye staring back at me, a lock of gray straggly hair in its way. I don't often look at my reflection and to peer at this moment directly into my eye feels more disconcerting than it should, as if I can sense I'm about to be judged.

I pull my wool cardy--an old one of my father's--more tightly around me, tucking the loose end under my arm. It's dropped a degree today, the wind must have changed easterly during the night, and later we'll get fog in the valley. I don't need a barograph or a hygrometer these days, I can sense it--pressure changes, a shift in humidity--but, to tell the truth, I also think about the weather to help me take my mind off things. If I didn't have it to ponder right now, I'd already be getting slightly anxious. She's late.

My smoky breath turns to liquid as it hits the window and, if I rub the mist into heavy droplets, I can make it trickle down the glass. From here I can see half the length of the grassy drive as it winds through the tall skeletal limes on either side, until it disappears right, curving downhill towards East Lodge and the lane and the outside world. If I move my head a fraction to the left the drive elongates and the tops of the limes veer suddenly to the side, distorted by the imperfections of handmade glass. Moving it a little to the right splits the beech hedge in two on either side of a bubble. I know every vagary of every pane. I've lived here all my life and, before me, my mother lived here all her life and, before her, her father and grandfather.

Did I tell you that Vivien said in her letter she was returning for good? For some final peace, she said, because now, she said, we ought to be keeping each other company for the rest of our lives, rather than dying lonely and alone. Well, I'll tell you now, I don't feel lonely and I certainly don't feel as if I'm dying, but even so I'm glad she's coming home. Glad, and a little nervous--a surge of apprehension is swelling in my stomach. I can't help wondering what we'll talk about after all these years and, I suppose, if I'll even recognize her.

I'm not, as a rule, an emotional person. I'm far too--how shall I put it?--levelheaded. I was always the sensible sister and Vivi was the adventurer, but my excitement at her impending arrival even sur- prises me.

She is late, however. I look at my wristwatch--the digital one on my left wrist. Her letter most specifically read one-thirty and, believe me, it's not my timekeeping that's gone awry. I keep a number of clocks just so I can be sure that, even if one or two let me down, I can always find the correct time. When you live by yourself in a house that you very rarely leave and is even more rarely visited, it's essen- tial that you don't lose track of the time. Every minute lost--if left uncorrected--would soon accumulate to an hour, and then hours, until--as you can imagine--you could easily end up living in a completely erroneous time frame.

Our mother, Maud, and I were always waiting for Vivi: in the hall before we went to church or shouting for her from the landing to hurry up for school. And it's now, as I wait for her again, that I find snippets of our childhood jumping into my head, slices of conversation, things I've not thought about since they happened: our first pair of boots,...

From the Hardcover edition....

"Ms. Adams has a lot to offer: a plain but compelling prose style, a wealth of incident and a deft psychological acuity." --Martin Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

"With it's stylish prose, taut plotting and dark psychology, The Sister is reminiscent of the best books by Ruth Rendell's alter-ego, Barbara Vine...[Poppy Adams] writes sparkling prose and expertly weaves into the action what seems an inexhaustible knowledge of moths." --Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World

"Dark and sinister, The Sister draws you in like a moth to a flame...A wholly satisfying character study with heart throbbing twists that will leave you shuddering." --Chris Stuckenschneider, The Missourian

"Suspenseful...Adams creates an engrossing atmosphere of gothic mystery." --The New Yorker

"Captivating...The odd characters who make up The Sister are extraordinary, each one more unsettling than the next, and their fractured group portrait is deliciously chilling." --Susan Miron, The Miami Herald

"The Sister is an ideal book for discussion groups, because it prompts analysis with a surprise ending that is both stunning and ambiguous." --Mandy Twaddell, The Providence Journal

"The Sister is powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary suspense that propelled Donna Tartt's The Secret History onto best-seller lists...Ms. Adams makes Ginny such an intriguingly unreliable narrator that the reader is continually kept off balance." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Adams spins a suspenseful, provocative, deliberately ambiguous tale about decay and disrepair--of people and the bonds between them--and about the harm that comes from even well-intended secrecy and silence." --Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Sun

"The great beauty of this splendid first novel lies in Ginny's voice, perfectly clear, controlled and calm...A brilliant narrative performance." --Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe

"Readers will be haunted by this chilling psychological drama." --Sue Corbett, People Magazine

"Deliciously creepy...[The Sister] reminds us of A.S. Byatt, Kate Atkinson and Stephen King having a house party." --Colette Bancroft, The Detroit News

"A genuinely eerie thriller...a chilling contemporary gothic." --Margaret Flanagan, Booklist

"A chilling and disturbing novel." --Laurel Bliss, Library Journal, starred review

"Chilling...an eerie and accomplished debut." --Publishers Weekly

"Engrossing." --Kirkus Reviews

"Whatever Happened to Baby Jane comes to Devon, in Adams's gothic tale of madness, sibling rivalry and lepidoptera. Adams is a skillful, entertaining storyteller.' --The Guardian

"This is a dark book, but an extremely funny one, recalling Mark Haddon and Barbara Trapido by turns. A brilliantly paced debut." --Daily Mail

"[A] striking debut novel...[The Sister] is also, in its quietly idiosyncratic way, a novel of ideas. When Ginny reflects on the 'analytic and scientific' cast of mind she inherited from her father, it's difficult not to think of Keats and the 'touch of cold philosopy' that 'unweaves' the poetry of natural phenomena. Adams took a risk in deciding to tell her story in the flat, abstracted voice of someone who has devoted her life to a 'little known insect.' But it is a convincing, true voice and it is to Adams's credit that she sustains it as she does." --Financial Times

"Cognitive dissonance is what drives the plot, and that makes this quite a bold first novel.