Book Review | A Powerful Novel About Sisterly Love
No Such Thing as Monday is a powerful novel written with such charm that you don’t get lost in gloom despite the sadness
No Such Thing as Monday is set in the UK in the last few decades of the 20th century. We meet Stephanie who comes from a stereotypical working-class family. Her father is a patriarch of the worst kind — violent and manipulative. When he loses his job, her mother takes in laundry and slogs 24x7. Her older sister Caroline gets the full brunt of her father’s violence. For some reason, he doesn’t like her, and perhaps to dig the knife into her wound even deeper, he treats Stephanie like his favourite pet.
Stephanie enjoys his pampering without really understanding it when she is little but lives unhappily ever after with guilt as an adult: Guilt for not standing up for Caroline when her father treated her like a pariah, denied her food, and physically kicked her like a dog. Shame for not looking for Caroline when she mysteriously vanished from home at the age of sixteen. The neighbours and school mates were aware of the way her father mistreated Caroline — there was even a rumour that he had murdered Caroline and secretly disposed of her remains. Stephanie finds out years later that her neighbour was still in touch with Caroline. “…I wondered if Mum had known all along where she went. The police, and Mum, and Aunty Kathleen…They didn’t tell me though, in case he found out. They were right. If he’d asked me, I would have told him. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.”
It’s not as though being Daddy’s pet makes Stephanie’s life wonderful. Her grandmother is sharp with her because she aligns with that nasty man her daughter married. She’s known as the bad sister for no fault of hers to begin with, but as she stumbles and fumbles through life and gets in with a bad crowd because she’s lonely and vulnerable, she does do things she isn’t proud of.
The guilt and shame surface when her father dies. That’s when she thinks back to the past and understands a little more about it. She briefly considers calling her sister with the news but doesn’t dare to. After all, her father gave Caroline no reason to weep at his passing, and would Caroline even want to talk to her?
Stephanie struggles, but manages to cope, till she doesn’t. Caroline is always at the back of her mind. She yearns for redemption, but will she ever get it?
No Such Thing as Monday is a powerful novel written with such charm that you don’t get lost in gloom despite the sadness. But you do hope for a ray of light at the end of this long tunnel, and perhaps, just perhaps, you get to see it.
No Such Thing as Monday
By Sian Hughes
Picador India
pp. 240; Rs 499