My Sister, the Serial Killer

Korede is a nurse, orderly, plain and reliable. Her sister Ayoola is beautiful, careless, and has now killed three boyfriends, each time telephoning Korede to help with the cleaning.

The arrangement holds until Ayoola begins seeing the doctor Korede is in love with. Braithwaite establishes the arrangement in the first chapter without any exposition at all, and the reader understands the entire situation within three pages.

Three dead boyfriends, and her sister calls her every time to help with the bleach.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

It is very short, told in chapters that are frequently under two pages, and can be read in a couple of hours.

The compression is the book's defining quality. Nothing is developed beyond what the situation requires, and the economy produces a sharpness a longer version would lose.

It is genuinely funny, largely through Korede's exasperated practicality about the logistics of disposal and her resentment of her sister's ease.

The humour never softens the material and is not used as relief; it is simply the register in which Korede experiences her own life.

The novel's actual subject is what a sibling relationship compels, and Korede's compliance is treated as neither weakness nor loyalty.

Their shared history with a violent father is disclosed gradually and supplies the explanation without excusing anything. Braithwaite also refuses to let Korede off by making Ayoola sympathetic, and the sister remains genuinely careless about the people she kills.

Ayoola's appearance functions as an operating asset: it secures forgiveness, attention and the benefit of the doubt in every situation the novel depicts.

Braithwaite is precise about the practical advantages it confers and about Korede's accurate resentment of them. The novel also notes that Korede's own competence is consistently less visible than Ayoola's appearance, including to people who depend on it professionally.

The city is present in specifics — traffic, hospital conditions, domestic staff, social media, the particular textures of middle-class Nigerian life.

The setting is unremarked rather than explained, which is the correct decision and means the novel never pauses to orient a foreign reader. The domestic staff in particular are drawn specifically, and the household's dependence on people whose discretion is assumed is used for the plot.

The sisters' father is disclosed across the book as a violent and corrupt man whose death was not straightforward.

The material is delivered in short fragments and is the novel's darkest content, and it reframes Ayoola without converting her into a victim. Braithwaite delivers it in fragments across the whole novel rather than in a single flashback, which keeps it from operating as an explanation the reader can settle into.

She narrates and is complicit throughout, and the novel is uninterested in resolving her into either accomplice or casualty.

Her confessions to a comatose patient are the book's best device, letting her speak without consequence and letting the reader hear what she cannot say aloud.

It is marketed as a thriller and is closer to a domestic comedy with corpses in it, with no investigation and very little jeopardy.

Readers expecting suspense will find the police almost entirely absent, which is deliberate and is part of the book's point about who gets investigated.

Clipped, present-tense and extremely controlled, with short sentences and almost no description.

Braithwaite's economy is consistent and the voice never slips, which is a considerable achievement across a whole novel however short. The chapter titles are also single words, which reinforces the compression and gives the book a formal consistency it maintains throughout.

It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was longlisted for the Booker, and it brought Braithwaite substantial international attention.

Its success also contributed to a wider English-language readership for contemporary Nigerian fiction. It was also widely read as satire of a particular kind of family dynamic, and Braithwaite has discussed the sibling material as the book's actual origin.

Readers who want something short, funny and genuinely unsettling, and who do not require a crime novel to contain an investigation.

It is among the most immediately enjoyable books in this section and is over before it outstays anything. Readers wanting plot machinery should look elsewhere.