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Books About Siblings: 9 Novels About Brothers, Sisters and the Ties We Can’t Cut
A sibling is often the person who has known you longest. They remember the house you grew up in, the jokes nobody else gets and the fights you would rather forget. That is why stories about brothers and sisters can hit so hard.
Book Three · The Train Between Worlds
The Forty-Year Passenger
A novel of a lost brother, a vanished mother, and the woman who has been mapping the train since 1981.
This site publishes a novel about a brother who refuses to stop showing up. Abel Quist has been aboard a train with no destination board for fifteen years. Every morning at twenty past ten he brings tea to his brother Peter, a joiner, in the third bay on the left of the nineteenth carriage, and every morning Peter, who can hold about a day and a half at a time, is delighted to meet a man he does not recognise. On this train every door costs one true memory of the person you would go back for, and in fifteen years Abel has opened eleven.
Then he finds a surveyor’s mark cut into a wall, dated 1981, and learns that a woman called Verity Sloane has been mapping the train for forty-five years, and that one of the entries in her notebooks is his brother. Like I Know This Much Is True, it is about loving a brother who cannot love you back in the same way; unlike it, it is speculative, cool and exact, and as much a moral argument as a family story. It is Book Three of The Train Between Worlds and a standalone novel.
A standalone novel — new readers can start here
Short answer
The best books about siblings in fiction start with The Dutch House, Ann Patchett’s novel about a brother and sister exiled from their childhood home, and A River Runs Through It, the short American classic about two brothers and a river. For twins, The God of Small Things and The Vanishing Half; for brothers, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sisters Brothers and I Know This Much Is True; for step-siblings, Commonwealth; for losing a sibling, Everything I Never Told You. No spoilers.
What to expect from The Forty-Year Passenger
Where it lines up with the books above, and where it does not:
- Same as the books above
- A sibling bond tested by time and illness, and the question of what you owe someone because you share a family.
- Different
- Speculative: a train that charges in memory. The brother is alive and aboard; the drama is an argument, not a family saga.
- Point of view
- Abel Quist, with Verity Sloane’s notebooks threaded through.
- Tone
- Cool, exact and morally argumentative. The antagonist is never quite a villain.
- Content notes
- Dementia, a sibling who no longer recognises the narrator, a missing son, exploitation of vulnerable people.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
What makes a great sibling novel?
On Reddit, readers regularly ask for “books with a heavy focus on sibling relationships”, and searches for books about brothers and books about sisters sit right beside it. This list covers all of them: brothers, sisters, twins and step-siblings, in realistic and slightly strange stories. The best share a few things:
- Shared history. The past is always in the room.
- Love and resentment together. Usually at the same time.
- Different paths. Siblings who grew up the same way but became very different people.
- Loyalty tested. What do you owe someone because you share a family?
Each pick says what it is like to read, who it suits, what it contains, and when to skip it. Several deal with the death of a sibling; the “Contains” line says which.
9 books about siblings
In the order we would hand them to you.
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The Dutch House
Closest match Brother and sister, at their most loyalDanny Conroy and his older sister Maeve grow up in the Dutch House, an extravagant glass-fronted mansion outside Philadelphia that their father bought as a surprise for their mother. Their mother leaves; their father remarries; and after his death their stepmother, Andrea, puts the two of them out of the house. For decades afterwards they keep driving back to park across the street and look at it, talking about everything except what they are doing there.
It is a warm, wise story about a brother and sister who hold each other up, told by Danny over fifty years, and it is very good on the way siblings carry a shared grievance until it becomes a shared language. Maeve is one of Patchett’s great characters: fierce, funny and entirely devoted. It was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and Tom Hanks reads the audiobook. If you only read one book on this page, make it this one.
- How it ends
- It ends decades on, with the house and the people who lived in it seen differently.
- Contains
- A mother who leaves her children; A parent’s death; Chronic illness
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want plot; it is a slow, conversational book that lives in the car outside the house.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, setting, awards, audiobook
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A River Runs Through It
Closest match Brothers, shortA novella, not a novel, and one of the great American stories about brothers. “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing”, it begins. Norman and his younger brother Paul are the sons of a Presbyterian minister in western Montana, raised on the Blackfoot River. The story is mostly set over one summer when both are grown men: Norman careful and newly married, Paul a brilliant fisherman and a reporter who drinks and gambles and will not be helped.
It is short, beautiful and semi-autobiographical; Maclean wrote it in his seventies about his own brother. What it understands about siblings is the helplessness of loving someone you cannot reach, and the way a shared skill can be the only language you have left. The Pulitzer fiction jury recommended it in 1977, the board gave no award that year, and Robert Redford filmed it in 1992. You can read it in an afternoon.
- How it ends
- It ends with the narrator old and alone at the river, and one of the most quoted last lines in American fiction.
- Contains
- Alcoholism; A violent death, reported rather than shown
- Skip if
- Skip it if long passages about fly casting will bore you; the fishing is the point, not the scenery.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, the Pulitzer, Paul Maclean, film
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The God of Small Things
Strong match Twins and family secretsEstha and Rahel are two-egg twins, a boy and a girl, growing up in Ayemenem in Kerala in 1969, in a family full of secrets and rules about who may love whom. Their English cousin Sophie Mol comes to visit, and over a few days something happens that ends their childhood and separates them. The story moves between that December and the twins’ return to the family house as adults in 1993, when Rahel comes home to Estha, who has stopped speaking.
The language is playful, full of the twins’ private words, capital letters and backwards readings, and the heartbreak is deep: this is a novel about how the closest bond in a family can be bent by what the adults around it do. It was Roy’s first novel and won the Booker Prize in 1997. It is lush and unforgettable, and it is also one of the hardest books here; read the “Contains” line before you start.
- How it ends
- It ends not in 1993 but back in 1969, with a night the whole book has been withholding.
- Contains
- The death of a child; Child sexual abuse; Police and caste violence; Incest between adult siblings
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want a straight timeline; the book tells you most outcomes early and makes you wait for the why.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, setting, Booker Prize
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The Vanishing Half
Strong match Twin sisters, two livesDesiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins from Mallard, Louisiana, a small town founded for light-skinned Black residents. In 1954, at sixteen, they run away to New Orleans together. Years later one has come home with a dark-skinned daughter, and the other has vanished into a life as a white woman in California, hiding her past from her husband and her daughter. A generation later, the twins’ daughters, Jude and Kennedy, cross paths.
It is a novel about sisters who chose very different lives, and about what each costs: Stella’s secret is a sibling bond cut on purpose, and the book never lets her forget it. It spans four decades and moves easily, with the pull of a family saga. It debuted at number one on the New York Times list and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Read it if you want sisters at the centre, and a book that is about race and identity as much as family.
- How it ends
- It ends with the daughters grown and the sisters in middle age, and nothing tied up too neatly.
- Contains
- A lynching, witnessed in childhood; Domestic violence; Racism throughout
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the twins together; they are apart for most of the book, and the daughters carry much of it.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, awards
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Everything I Never Told You
Strong match Losing a sibling“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” The first line tells you what the family will learn on the first morning: in Middlewood, Ohio, in 1977, the Lees’ favourite child, sixteen-year-old Lydia, is missing, and her body is found in the town lake. As her parents, James and Marilyn, and her brother Nath and little sister Hannah try to understand what happened, the book goes back through everything each of them never said aloud.
It is sad and gripping, and the siblings are where it is most precise: Nath, who has spent his life in Lydia’s shadow and is about to leave for college, and Hannah, the youngest, who notices everything because nobody notices her. It is also a novel about a mixed-race family in a small town, and about parents who pour their own disappointments into one child. Ng’s debut, it was Amazon’s book of the year for 2014.
- How it ends
- It ends with the family still grieving, and beginning, slowly, to speak to each other.
- Contains
- The death of a teenager; Racism; Parental pressure and emotional neglect
- Skip if
- Skip it if you have lost a sibling recently; the grief is the whole book, and it does not soften it.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, setting, family, awards
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The Brothers Karamazov
Looser match The big classicThree very different brothers and their father. Dmitri is passionate and reckless, Ivan is a brilliant atheist, and Alyosha, the youngest, is a novice monk and the book’s gentle centre; the servant Smerdyakov may be a fourth, illegitimate brother. Their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, is a buffoon and a sensualist who neglected all of them. When he is murdered, every brother has a motive, and the crime pulls them all into a question about guilt and faith.
It is long but rewarding, and many readers call it the greatest novel about brothers: Ivan’s argument with Alyosha, including the chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor”, is one brother trying to talk another out of God, out of love. It was Dostoevsky’s last novel, serialised in 1879–80. If you have not read Russian fiction before, choose a modern translation; Pevear and Volokhonsky’s won a PEN prize.
- How it ends
- It ends not with the trial but at a child’s funeral, with Alyosha talking to a group of boys.
- Contains
- A murder; A suicide; Cruelty to children, described in Ivan’s argument
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want siblings first and philosophy second; long stretches are theology and courtroom.
Checked against: Wikipedia: serialisation, characters, translations
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The Sisters Brothers
Strong match Dark comedy with heartOregon, 1851. Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired gunmen, sent south by a man called the Commodore to California in the Gold Rush to kill a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm. Charlie, the older, drinks and kills easily. Eli, who tells the story, is soft-hearted, worried about his weight and his horse, and beginning to wonder whether he wants this life at all. The journey is a string of strange, violent and very funny encounters.
It is funny, violent and surprisingly tender about two men who cannot escape each other: under the deadpan comedy, it is a book about a younger brother trying to work out whether loyalty to his brother is the same as being himself. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Governor General’s Award in Canada, and the 2018 film stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. If moral ambiguity is your thing, see our list of books with morally grey characters.
- How it ends
- It ends somewhere neither brother has been for years, and it is gentler than anything before it.
- Contains
- Frequent graphic violence; Injury to animals, including a horse; Maiming
- Skip if
- Skip it if animal suffering is a hard line; Eli’s horse has a bad time.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, awards, film
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Commonwealth
Strong match Step-siblingsOne christening party in 1960s Southern California, one uninvited guest and one kiss: Bert Cousins kisses Beverly Keating, two marriages end, and six children, two Keatings and four Cousinses, end up spending their summers together in Virginia, largely unsupervised. Something happens on one of those summers that none of them talks about. The book follows them across about fifty years, out of order, as one of them, Franny, tells the story to a famous older novelist who turns it into a book of his own.
It is for anyone who grew up in a blended family: Patchett’s own parents divorced and her mother married a man with four children, and she has said that none of it happened and all of it is true. It is very good on step-siblings as a gang, allies against the adults, and on how a shared secret can bind people for life. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is also, quietly, a book about losing a sibling.
- How it ends
- It ends decades on, with the grown children and their parents still living with that summer.
- Contains
- The death of a child; Children given sedatives; Parental neglect
- Skip if
- Skip it if you like to know whose head you are in; it jumps decades and narrators without warning.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, autobiographical roots
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I Know This Much Is True
Strong match Twin brothers, care and resentmentDominick Birdsey’s identical twin brother, Thomas, has paranoid schizophrenia. The book opens in 1990 in the public library of Three Rivers, Connecticut, where Thomas cuts off his own hand, believing it will stop the Gulf War. Dominick, who has spent his whole life protecting Thomas and resenting him at the same time, has to fight to get him out of a state hospital, while working out his own past, his family’s history and the grandfather whose memoir he is given.
It is long and emotional, and it is the most honest book here about loving a sibling who needs looking after: the exhaustion, the guilt, and the way a twin can feel like a version of yourself you have been spared. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 1998, and HBO adapted it in 2020 with Mark Ruffalo as both brothers. At over nine hundred pages, give it time.
- How it ends
- It ends with loss and with a kind of peace, and the title is earned.
- Contains
- Self-harm, shown in the first chapter; Suicide; Sexual abuse; The death of an infant; Psychiatric hospitalisation
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want something short; this is the longest book on the page by a wide margin.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, Oprah pick, HBO series
Quick guide: which one first?
| If you want… | Start with |
|---|---|
| A loyal brother and sister | The Dutch House |
| Brothers, quiet and short | A River Runs Through It |
| Twin sisters | The Vanishing Half |
| Twins and family secrets | The God of Small Things |
| Dark comedy | The Sisters Brothers |
| A blended family | Commonwealth |
| Losing a sibling | Everything I Never Told You |
| A big classic | The Brothers Karamazov |
Shortest: A River Runs Through It (a novella). Longest: I Know This Much Is True (901 pp).
Why sibling stories matter
Parents usually leave us first, and partners usually come later. Siblings are often the only people who share our whole life story. Novels about them explore what it means to belong to someone you did not choose, and what we owe each other when one of us forgets, falls or drifts away. You can see the range on this page: Maeve and Danny parked outside a house, Dominick sitting with Thomas, Norman watching Paul fish and unable to help him.
If the version of that question you care about is a sibling who is still there but no longer knows you, our list of fiction books about dementia has novels about exactly that. If you want quiet, devastating books about people who belong to each other in a world that does not care, try books like Never Let Me Go.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia: The Dutch House (novel) — Setting, narrator, Pulitzer finalist.
- Wikipedia: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories — The opening line, Paul Maclean, the 1977 Pulitzer decision.
- Wikipedia: I Know This Much Is True — Page count, opening, adaptation.
FAQ
What are good fiction books about siblings?
What is a good novel about brothers?
Are there fiction books about losing a sibling?
What is a short book about siblings?
Are there good books about sisters?
The Vanishing Half is the strongest sisters novel on this page. Little Women, which is as much about sisters as about their mother, is on our list of books about mothers and daughters.