WHEN Charlotte Wood decided to create a collection of stories about siblings, it was never going to be just a mushy collection to buy for your grandma at Christmas.
"One of the reasons I chose the writers I did was I knew none of them had a sentimental bone in their body," Charlotte writes.
- Brothers and Sisters, edited by Charlotte Wood. Allen & Unwin, rrp $32.99
The collection includes new stories and essays from an impressive list of Australian writers, including Nam Le, Christos Tsiolkas, Cate Kennedy and a fantastic, surprising piece by Ashley Hay about being and having an only child.
The idea for the book came partly from readers, according to Charlotte.
"It grew out of my last novel, The Children (2007), which dealt in large part with strained relationships between adult siblings," she says.
"I was quite unprepared for the intensity of readers' responses to the relationships between the siblings portrayed in that book.
"It seemed that there was great richness out there in people's experience of the sibling relationship."
The sibling relationships in these stories are often complicated and messy, but also caring.
A man flies north to his estranged brother's funeral.
A young woman looks on enviously as her sister embraces life in London, while she remains on the fringes, lonely and homesick for Australia.
A young man's older brother returns from prison.
As Charlotte puts it in the introduction to the book: "Your brother or sister, it might be said, is your other self - your grander, sadder, braver, shrewder, uglier, slenderer self."
