The Twin
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
The Twin
Buy Now for £13.99
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Narrated by:
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Emma Powell
About this listen
A heart-wrenching family drama, perfect for fans of Erica James, Elizabeth Noble, Joanna Trollope and Anita Shreve!
A splintered childhood.
A family divided.
An ugly past resurfaces…
From birth, twins Cath and Rob are inseparable. When their mother dies, their bond deepens as their father hastily remarries a woman with a volatile temper whose sole focus is her own baby – Oliver – who arrives nine months later.
When, aged 47, Rob tragically dies, Cath’s world begins to crumble. Her grief compounded further by Oliver’s out-of-the-blue decision to attend Rob’s funeral, opening old wounds after three decades of estrangement.
Thrown together, the half-siblings are forced to confront a past that sends shockwaves through both their lives due to the huge discrepancies in their respective recollections. But could both their versions of the truth be correct…?
Fans of Cathy Kelly and Joanna Trollope will adore Amanda Brookfield’s rich and riveting dissection of relationships, family life and the big consequences that arise from everyday actions…
Praise for Amanda Brookfield's THE TWIN:
'A poignant, engrossing novel and a gripping emotional rollercoaster.'- Helen McGinn
'The queen of powerful, psychological drama at the top of her game. An exquisitely-written, tenderly-observed, absolute roller-coaster of emotions into the enduring power of sibling bonds trying to survive, to live and love. I laughed, I cried, One I recommend from the bottom of my heart' - Louise Douglas
'This is a masterpiece of a story about grief, family ties, and the restorative power of love. It brought me to tears and kept me gripped until the end. Beautiful!'- Sheila Norton
'A gentle and moving portrait of family, grief and new beginnings.' - Laura Pearson
'No one gets to the heart of human relationships quite so perceptively as Brookfield.' The Mirror
'An engaging, emotionally-charged and intriguing story' Michelle Gorman
'Unputdownable. Perceptive. Poignant. I loved it.' Patricia Scanlan
'If Joanna Trollope is the queen of the Aga Saga, then Amanda Brookfield must be a strong contender for princess.' Oxford Times
©2025 Amanda Brookfield (P)2025 Boldwood BooksListeners also enjoyed...
Only connect. Yet they are disconnected. The very structure of this excellent novel, written partly in the first-person, partly third person narrative, ensures not only that the reader is forced to piece together past, present, reliability, dodgy, lies and truth almost in the manner of a murder mystery but also that this structure forces the characters NOT to connect. I really loved this albeit familiar tale of old children, totally messed up, Larkin-style, by their mums and dads and taking misery to new levels.
The hopeless, hapless communication between characters is seen in, alternating chapters featuring first person narrator Kath , the anti-heroine of the story and Oliver, her half-brother, who is portrayed in the third person. Kath's tale is woefully self-centred, agonised and fretful, almost to the point that, as I was LISTENING to the story via Audible (excellent reader) , I wanted to throw things at my phone! It may be fair to describe Kath as an unreliable narrator because we see mainly her side of the story, yet she does actually stalk her widowed sister-in-law's children, throw wine at Joanne and is variably described as 'strong' and 'wilful' by a range of characters. A tragic figure, in many ways, who has failed to connect and communicate with her half-sibling and who perhaps, (though we cannot be sure) was not quite as close to her dead twin as we are led to believe.
The men are shown as sympathetic characters ; both Oliver and Kath's husband Al grow in our estimation during the novel and both tire of their partners because they are petty, unyielding or obsessed . The villain of the piece is surely Diane who, although she has had a troubled youth, has zero redeeming qualities and , if we are to find one trigger for Kath's downward spiral as a child, it has to be the dreaded hair-cutting episode, remembered late in the novel and which is revelatory to Oliver, her half-brother. It is this character who forced the breakup of the original family unit when the twin's mother died and whisked their father away to America. For years there is no connection between father and daughter, to the huge regret, we eventually find out, of both parties.
I return again to the structure of the novel because, as the (virtual!) pages turn, we do gradually learn the origins of the dreadful relationships in the family, the alcoholism of the dead twin, the OCD behaviour of Kath and her sad failure to cope with his death. There are interesting symbolic extraneous characters; the little girl in gumboots, the man at the graveside, both important to keep Kath somehow onside, with some hope of redemption.
It is difficult to see how this family could ever be reconciled and I find the dream sequence probably a neat way to finish, though I am not convinced that Al will stay or that Kath will not relapse into despondency.
Reader gets perfectly inside the unreliable narrator’s head - an excellent novel , superbly delivered
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