Mellors’ second novel zips between the chaotic lives of three sisters come together to mourn in this symphonic dynamo of a book

“Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of something magic,” thinks Bonnie, eldest-by-one of the Blue sisters. “Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass.”

And, like such groupings of four, each of the four Blue sisters are like equally opposing but necessary forces. On paper, they couldn’t be more dissimilar from one another — four points on a Cartesian plane, each occupying a different quadrant.

There’s the youngest Lucky, whose narrative begins the book — Coco Mellors’ electrifying bestseller that follows the lives of three sisters as they slowly gravitate towards one another following the death of their second youngest sister, Nicky. A natural, striking beauty, Lucky is a successful high-fashion model who flits between Paris, Milan and London, coasting on a wave of substances — booze, cigarettes, drugs — that comes with the profession like an unspoken perk. Ever on the hunt for her next fix (which soon enough presents itself anyway) she leads a numbed yet frenetic life of transience, embarrassed by, and at odds with, a career that lacks the integrity and intelligence she secretly harbours but which her looks conceal.

Then there’s Bonnie, second eldest of the four. Formerly based in New York, Bonnie hung up the gloves after an embarrassing boxing defeat that lost her a career-defining champion title, and relocated to LA where she now works as a bouncer. Clean-living and aloof, she lives quietly and mechanically in the shadow of her could-have-been career — as well as the unrequited feelings she quietly harboured for her New York coach, Pavel.

Avery, meanwhile, is the eldest Blue sister. Living in London with her therapist partner, Chiti, she works as a high-power corporate lawyer who sneaks in cigarettes when she can — thinking no one, including Chiti, is aware about the one release she allows herself since her long and challenging battle with alcohol. During one of her weekly AA meetings, Avery befriends fellow recoveree Charlie, a younger London poet she finds herself unexpectedly falling for and who will test her bond with Chiti.

Though deceased, the presence of Nicky — their beloved sister — is nonetheless felt, quietly weaved into the book’s pages. This, like Blue Sisters itself, is put into motion when their cold, unfeeling mother emails all three sisters informing them of her intentions to sell the childhood home — a New York apartment where Nicky continued to live right up to her death, and where she was found dead by Bonnie following an overdose. Having suffered from endometriosis since her youth — a debilitatingly painful disease affecting the pelvic region — Nicky nurtured a secret addiction to the pain medication she relied on in order to avoid having a hysterectomy. A hardworking English teacher whom everyone loved, Nicky was desperate to have children of her own — and, one day, the white-picket-fence dream home, tied up with a bow.

It is addiction — along with remorse — that tightly binds these women with starkly opposed personalities and lifestyles. Substance abuse of some form — and their ability to numb and postpone pain — lies at the heart of this book, with each sister an eternal victim of their own habits. (It’s stressed that even clean-living and sober Bonnie is addicted to the pains, stresses and thrills of her job as a boxer, while the health-obsessed compulsions she abides are thought of like a form of addiction).

Yet equally important, however, is the chosen careers of each sister and the location in which they chose to pursue them. What we choose to do with our life (and where), the book suggests, is an important signifier as to who we are, where our compulsions lie, what we’re hiding from.

For Avery, of course, this translates into a high-power career in corporate law spent residing over high-stakes legal issues — mirroring the responsibilities she possesses as eldest sister to keep the family safe (note the slippage between Avery/an aviary of birds; it’s Avery who foots the bill of the New York family nest despite it being physically empty). For fledgling Lucky — sitting at the opposite end of the scale in terms of both profession and age — this manifests as a non-committal and powerless career in modeling being told where to be and when, avoiding the prospect of adulthood, agency and real life as a child might do. For Bonnie, the distance and walls she puts up around herself and others mirror her chosen career as an ultra-committed boxer-turned-stone-cold-bouncer.

Again, this is mirrored in the dynamics of their dysfunctional and rather unloving childhood, a time during which, according to Bonnie, “their mother was afraid of Avery, baffled by Bonnie, intermittently charmed by Nicky, and oblivious to Lucky.” This, perhaps, is the crux of the novel: the notion that we are, quite simply, the product of what we grew up in — which, for the sisters, was an unstable home headed by an emotionally abusive mother and an alcoholic and violent father whose erratic moods dictated much of their home life.

Indeed, despite having flown the nest and obtained successful careers, the sisters live frozen in time, as though arrested in their childhood roles with Avery serving as the glue that holds the family together — the mother in absentia. With each chapter dedicated to the narratives of each, Blue Sisters charts the lives of the three remaining sisters as they work towards their eventual reunion in New York — where they must inevitably face up to the fact, once and for all, that their sister is gone by organising, donating and throwing out her possessions.

Mellors dedicates most of the book to setting up the lives of all three sisters. More often than not, this takes the form of work, addiction and relationship stresses. Avery juggles her own high-power career with the demands of Chiti’s own as a successful therapist, while the bond between them travels further into troubled waters through Avery’s new-found spark with poet Charlie. Bonnie’s lacklustre career as an L.A. bouncer keeps her from facing up to the man she loves, Pavel, and the career she was destined for in New York — which, the longer she avoids, the more her biological-prime clock ticks and the less likely she is to make it as the champion she nearly was. And, lastly, Lucky’s aimless, drifting career as an international model, studded with one night stands but ever sustained by a raging love affair with drugs and alcohol.

Looming over all their woes, however, is the loss of Nicky. The tragic irony of Nicky’s death, like the illness itself, is sharply underscored by the lives of Avery, Bonnie and Nicky. Not wanting kids and seemingly gravitating towards brutal and chaotic lifestyles and careers that defy family, the three remaining sisters live lifestyles that fly in the face of the normalcy Nicky yearned for — adding to a collective, unspoken guilt over her death that stalks the pages of the book.

Jumping back and forth between many layers of times both past and present, we glimpse the lives of each sister, their relationship with one another and, separately, with Nicky (offering, by proxy, glimpses into Nicky’s own life and character). So unsettled and complex, this can often make for a head-spinning, labyrinthine read — and attempting to gauge where we are temporally can, if read piecemeal, be a challenge.

Adding to the melee is Mellors’ heavy authorial presence, which can have the effect of loading down the narrative and obfuscating the action of characters.

There’s a discernible strand of autofiction in Blue Sisters which no doubt accounts for this — so present, in fact, that Mellors almost feels like a fifth sibling. Mellors herself has opened up about her struggles with alcoholism, which here feel written into the personalities of each sister. She has lived in London, New York and L.A. and is no doubt acquainted with the currents of vice and self-destruction that flow through the channels of everyday life in each — the corner of every street, the cup of every other disposable coffee. In many ways, you wonder the Blue sisters represents a certain version of Mellors, each competing with the other, forces she is, or was once, unable to consolidate in her own mind.

This isn’t to say, however, that Mellors’ prose is unrefined somehow. On the contrary, Mellors dances a fine line between being at once acerbic and shrewd, and tender and funny in her treatment of subjects as varied as work, love, loss and addiction — especially, as pertains Lucky, the turbulent drink and drug cultures of London and Paris.

Throughout, she writes with lived-and-breathed experience, shining a light especially on the idiosyncrasies of place and space with razor sharp analysis. “Living in L.A. is like dating a really beautiful person who has nothing to say . . . Eventually you’re going to realize that you need to be around people who read books and have their real noses,” Avery tells Bonnie as they speak over the phone, the former baffled by her decision to live in such an un-Blue city. On London, Lucky ponders, travelling to a socialite friend she barely knows for press, “What other city would require you to take the overground to the tube to the bus just to get to a friend’s house on a Friday night?”.

And it’s through such incisive and detailed prose that Mellors is able to keep the many strands of this novel expertly calibrated — a feat given the novel’s considerably slight length. It’s just with so much authorial weight, it’s difficult to appreciate the essence of these three (and a half?) sisters to the extent we could.

In fact, given the substantial number of characters, temporalities and aims of this complex book, I wish Blue Sisters had more space to breathe — which, without losing Mellors’ unique voice, translates to more pages. These are the sorts of stories that warrant five or six hundred pages — a designation I don’t use lightly. An additional two hundred or so, I think, would have allowed Mellors to diffuse her authorial presence and expand on the emotional complexities of Avery, Bonnie and Lucky throughout — who are, it has to be said, sometimes at risk of becoming not much more than their personal attributes and qualities in a way that can feel somewhat taxonomic. And this would, perhaps, have paved the way for a more fleshed final act which I feel was on the slim side.

Nevertheless, Mellors does a fine job at spinning the many threads that make up this exceptional page-turner that pulls no punches in showcasing the messy, toxic but oh-so precious thing that is sisterhood.

It is an ambitious novel whose faults I can forgive thanks to the life-affirming frankness Mellors injects into her work. Breaking open the world of drug abuse with refreshing clarity and comic, gritty realism (even if she does indulge slightly in setting this up), she showcases the chew-you-up-and-spit-you-out quality of city life. Indeed, there are no rose-tinted, sexy depictions of drug taking to be found here, the sorts we’re used to receiving in popular culture that bypass the physical and mental consequences of getting fucked up. Instead, Mellors reveals hedonism for what it really is: the desperate, endless, pitiful attempt to escape the life, feelings and responsibilities that stem from a dysfunctional home — one the Blue sisters never really left. Through their loss, can Avery, Bonnie and Lucky finally learn to move on and fly the nest for good?

This article was first published on Counter Arts on May 4, 2025