My Sister's Bones

by Nuala Ellwood

  Q: So much of the novel is about the internal battles Kate and Sally face, in the form of PTSD and alcoholism, respectively, yet neither of them try to get help because of the stigma involved. Tell me a little bit about making that decision while writing.

  A: During the course of my research into PTSD I discovered that very few war reporters will admit that they are suffering psychological trauma for fear that they will be seen to have “lost their nerve.” As a woman, Kate will feel this even more as she tries to hold her own in such a male dominated industry and that is why I depicted her as being so stoical and reticent about getting help. As for Sally, when a person is in the grips of an addiction as she is with alcohol, there is a great deal of denial. Sally doesn’t think she has a problem. In fact, she sees herself as being the level-headed one while everybody else has the “problem.” There is a moment in the novel, however, that jolts Sally to her senses and makes her realize that she has to stop drinking and that she is, in fact, a lot stronger and braver than she thinks.

  Q: Which scene in My Sister’s Bones did you find most difficult to write?

  A: The scene where Nidal is killed. As a mother to a ten-year-old boy this was probably the most harrowing scene I have ever written. I had tears streaming down my face and was physically shaking as I wrote it. Even now, I can’t read that part without getting tearful.

  Q: In the “Behind the Book” essay, you state that each generation has its own war. How have you learned to carry yours, and how are you teaching your son to carry his?

  A: War is such a constant backdrop to all our lives and yet it is the thing that I find most difficult to make sense of. However, it is the casualties of war that I think we all have a collective responsibility for: the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” And I think being a compassionate person, helping your fellow man and woman, extending friendship, support, and shelter whenever and however we can, being a decent human being, are all things that I have learned and are the values I am passing on to my son. His horror at watching the news and seeing a dead child washed up on a beach was his first encounter with the effects of war and it is now burned into his memory. Hopefully, as he grows up he will remember that child and remember that human lives, safety, happiness, and unity are more important than borders and territories and divisions. A wonderful woman called Jo Cox, a British MP who was killed in 2016, once said that we have “more in common than that which divides us,” and it is these words that I hope my son will carry with him through life.

  Q: Was there a specific event that prompted you to write, in Martha Gellhorn’s words, this “angry sound against injustice”?

  A: I think the death of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times Foreign Correspondent, in Syria in 2012, prompted me to write this novel. I had always been fascinated with female war reporters but there was something about Marie, who I met briefly when I was in my early twenties, that epitomized Gellhorn’s words. Like Gellhorn, she always sought the human story within the chaos of war. If you read any of Marie Colvin’s dispatches from conflict zones, she will invariably start by describing an ordinary domestic detail, something we can all relate to, a family that was sitting around a dinner table, when moments later a bomb dropped on their house obliterating all but a six-year-old girl who spent the next few hours cowering under the very table that moments earlier had been a symbol of domesticity and safety. And I will never forget her dispatch from East Timor when she chose to stay put with stranded refugee women when all the men had fled, remarking that “they just don’t make men like they used to.”

  Marie was killed while covering the siege of Homs in Syria.

  A couple of weeks after her death I read a piece written by her sister, Cat, who described how when they were children, her older sister Marie, would curl up and tell her bedtime stories from far-flung places. When she had finished, she would smother her sister’s face in “postage stamp kisses” so that she could go off and explore those wonderful places in her dreams. And it made me think about the relationship between sisters and what would happen if one went out into the world, fighting injustice, while the other stayed at home. And that inspired me to create Sally, Kate’s sister, a character who was fighting her own internal battles that were just as tough as Kate’s physical ones.

  Q: What do you hope to leave readers with, as they finish My Sister’s Bones?

  A: I hope that through the story of Kate Rafter, I have shown the human cost of war. Not only through the psychological trauma suffered by Kate, but also the fate of little Nidal, a young boy who just wants to play football, to go to school, to be safe. There are so many children like Nidal, currently trapped in conflict zones around the world, and I hope this novel highlights just how important it is that these children receive the help and care that they need.

  Q: My Sister’s Bones is your debut novel. What did you learn during the writing process and how will it change as you tackle your next book?

  A: I was lucky to receive Arts Council England funding to research My Sister’s Bones and this allowed me to immerse myself fully in the subject matter and setting. I learned so much about the craft of writing, particularly thriller writing where pace and structure is so important, and how a novel evolves and alters from that initial idea to the finished piece. More than anything, the subjects I explored while writing My Sister’s Bones sparked so many ideas for future novels, which I’m really excited about. My next novel has a distinctive, watery setting—the the marshlands of East Sussex where Virginia Woolf drowned—and sees me exploring the taboo issue of assisted suicide but with a very unexpected twist! Like My Sister’s Bones, this novel has two very different female protagonists whose lives collide with explosive consequences. Writing this novel has been a very different experience to writing My Sister’s Bones and I had to be careful to lay the ghost of Kate Rafter and her distinctive voice to rest as I set about creating my new protagonists. But I feel very excited to be bringing two new, complex, and thrilling female characters to life and hopefully readers of My Sister’s Bones will enjoy meeting them!

  Behind the Book Essay

  Behind the Book: What Inspired Me to Write My Sister’s Bones

  “The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

  —Martha Gellhorn

  Everyone has their war; the one that haunts them, that defines their age, that walks beside them down the days like a silent shadow. For my Irish grandfather, it was the Easter Rising, which saw hundreds of young Irishmen stand up and fight for their country’s independence. For my father, it was Vietnam, when war was played out in real time and war reporting came into its own; while photographers such as Don McCullin broke through rigid censorship to show the world, in lurid technicolour, the true horrors of modern warfare. For me, it was the Bosnian war of the early 1990s that brought the concept of death and brutality hurtling into my teenage world.

  I had grown up reading books such as The Iliad, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia, but these were fictional battles with clear-cut divisions between good and bad and were no more real than the ghost stories I loved or the jolly man in a red suit who popped down the chimney every twenty-fifth of December.

  In 1992 I turned thirteen. It was the year of the Barcelona Olympics, of Kurt Cobain, of compilation tapes and first love. It was also the year of ethnic cleansing and massacres; of rape camps and horrors beyond anything my young mind had thus far encountered, and it was happening in a place I knew well, a place that I had always associated with beauty and happiness.

  For me, the Balkans was a magical place, a land of lakes and mountains and fairy tale bridges. This was mainly due to my favorite aunt who holidayed in what was then Yugoslavia each year and would send me postcards that I kept in an old shoebox, depicting unspoiled beaches and pretty town squares with hanging baskets and long tables laid for dinner. At thirteen I was learning about the assassination of Archduke Fran
z Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the tinderbox that ignited the carnage that would be the First World War. It fascinated me how one man’s mistake—the driver had taken a wrong turn—could shape history and how the city of Sarajevo, whose pretty cafés I had longed to visit, was the place from which one of the bloodiest wars in living history had begun.

  And so 1992 saw terror and beauty collide in the most heinous of ways and the picture postcard images I had lovingly collated were ripped apart and replaced with scenes of misery and despair. I was old enough now to watch the news and each night the images seemed to get worse and worse: broken bodies, sobbing mothers clutching children to their chests as they fled burning homes; emaciated figures with dead eyes staring out from behind barbed wire fences. This was war played out in real time—my time, our time—the time I was living through, growing up against. This was a war without end, without resolution; it had yet to be neatly explained and packaged up inside a history book. It was happening now, minute by minute, hour by sickening hour, as the world watched.

  Fast-forward a quarter of a century later and my nine-year-old son is in tears in front of the TV screen as he watches the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi being lifted from the sea and laid onto a Turkish beach. He turns to me and asks why that tiny boy came to be on a boat fleeing his homeland. So I tell him about Syria and now my son has his war.

  This horrifying conflict has become the war of our age and as I set out to write My Sister’s Bones I knew I would have to address it. As a mother, the plight of children trapped in war zones around the world chills my blood and through the character of Nidal, I wanted to tell the story of a little boy who just wanted to play with his friends and feel safe, something every child deserves.

  I also wanted to explore, through the recollections of the main character, war reporter Kate Rafter, the impact of war on the psyche. In the course of my research for this novel I discovered that the link between PTSD and war reporting has been woefully overlooked. I spoke to Dr. Anthony Feinstein, a leading psychologist, who has worked with traumatized war journalists. He told me that when he started out, there was almost no research being conducted into the link between PTSD and war reporting. I found this startling. However, when I spoke to journalists about this they said that very few of their peers would admit that they are having problems. Many reporters would rather bite their lip and carry on than to be seen to have “lost their nerve.” This inspired me to shape the character of Kate Rafter and to show, through her experience in Syria, the traumas faced by war reporters in their work and how this affects their mental state.

  My father was a journalist and his reports on the aftermath of the Beirut civil war really struck a chord with me when I was a child. I was brought up to believe that journalists write the first draft of history and I have long been in awe of female war correspondents such as Marie Colvin, Janine Di Giovanni, and Martha Gellhorn, not least for the way they made themselves heard in such a male-dominated world and always sought the human story within the chaos and horrors of war. Through the character of Kate Rafter I wanted to show the strength and courage but also the fragility and humanity of the war reporter. Her dogged quest to be heard will, I hope, serve as a timely reminder of how important it is, in the words of Martha Gellhorn, “to make an angry sound against injustice.”

  Reading Group Guide Questions

  1.In the beginning of the story, the narrator reveals that she’s having hallucinations, which she tries to hide from the doctor. It quickly becomes clear that Kate’s perspective may be unreliable. How does this change the way you read the rest of the story? Could you trust Kate as a narrator? How did you feel about trusting Sally’s narration?

  2.What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? How does Kate specifically manifest this disorder? Make a list of the symptoms you noticed.

  3.The structure of the narrative is complex. The first part alternates extended flashbacks with scenes of interrogation to piece together the truth, and the second part introduces a different perspective altogether. How would your experience of this story change if it were told in a straightforward way from a single perspective?

  4.How do the interrogation scenes set a mood for this story? Does this technique remind you of any other novels or films?

  5.Kate may seem a bit harsh toward her sister, Sally. What happened between them? Try to unpack the family dynamic. Do you think that Kate should be more compassionate or forgiving?

  6.Almost right away, we learn that Kate is dealing with her mother’s death and we soon learn about the little boy in Syria. Throughout the narrative, Kate’s perspective jumps back and forth through time, and it often seems like situations or memories are left out and then come back unexpectedly. Discuss the connection between PTSD and the narrative style. What is Kate’s mental state when she gets to Herne Bay, and what is she repressing? How does this change the way she tells her story?

  7.This book is first published about one year after Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, which has been experiencing a massive influx of Middle Eastern (especially Syrian) immigrants since 2011. How does this contemporary context bear on the events or characters in the story?

  8.Compare the narrative style and voice between Kate and Sally. How do they resemble each other? How do they differ?

  9.Discuss Paul’s development throughout the novel. Does he always appear to be what he seems? At what point did you sense that something was off?

  10.Kate is an investigator by nature. Without getting into the horrifying experience of working in a war zone, discuss how Kate’s job and her skillset complicates her battle with PTSD.

  11.In the first interrogation session, the doctor asks Kate whether her nightmares have gotten worse since she returned to Herne Bay. Kate responds, “No, they haven’t gotten worse . . . they’ve just become real.” What does she mean by this? Think of specific instances in the story when Kate’s nightmares became “real.” As a reader limited by Kate’s troubled perspective, how did you separate illusion from reality in these scenes?

  12.What do you make of Fida’s initial decision to keep quiet about the boy? What kind of pressure is she facing, and why does she finally decide to speak up?

  13.Think about the similarities between Kate’s late brother, David, and Nidal, the little boy from Syria. How do their experiences resonate with each other?

  14.What did you think about Kate’s father as a character? How far did the grief he had suffered contribute to the abuse he inflicted on his wife and daughter?

  15.How important is the character of Ray in the novel? Describe how he contributes to the plot development?

  16.Kate describes Ray’s hands as being “raw and calloused, as if he has spent a lifetime immersed in sea water.” How far is the brutal landscape reflected in the characters of Kate, Sally, Ray, and Paul?

  17.Kate’s lover Chris is a forensic archaeologist. At one point Kate says: “I was his secret; his buried bones. . . .” Explore the importance and significance of bones in the novel.

  18.What do you think Nidal would have become had he lived? Would he have been a writer? A footballer? Do you think he and Kate would still be in touch?

  19.When Kate suffers the miscarriage, she goes back to work almost immediately. What did you think about this?

  20.Kate and Sally had the same childhood but have grown up with very different recollections of it. Whose version did you believe?

  Read On

  Further Reading

  The novels that inspired My Sister’s Bones:

  The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker

  The Sea by John Banville

  The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

  Sister by Rosamund Lupton

  The Collector by John Fowles

  Neverhome by Laird Hunt

  Atonement by Ian McEwan

  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  The books I read to research My Sister’s Bones:

  Journalists Under Fire by Anthony Feinstein
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  On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

  The World of Robert Fisk serialised in The Independent on Sunday

  Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin

  Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

  Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni

  The Trouble I’ve Seen by Martha Gellhorn

  The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

  The Bone Woman by Clea Koff

  Books that are similar to My Sister’s Bones:

  The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

  The Widow by Fiona Barton

  Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

  Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey

  Room by Emma Donoghue

  The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

  The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni

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  Praise

  “Compelling and intriguing, right from the very first page.”

  —Sharon Bolton, Sunday Times bestselling author of Like This, For Ever

  “A stunning book. I was drawn in by Nuala Ellwood’s hypnotic, haunting and elegant prose. Compelling, unsettling and powerful, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.”