Sister Morphine

Masterful, darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant, this first novel by Catherine Eisner is an instant 21st-century classic. Sister Morphine tackles themes of suicidality, sibling murder, child abuse, morbid self-harm, guilt, jealousy, incest, drug addiction, infidelity, illegitimacy, obsessive compulsion, bereavement and a case of grand larceny in the second degree.

Eisner’s suite of women’s narratives is premised as confidential pages from the case notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN), documenting neuroses and drug therapy interventions. These disturbing case histories, reconstituted as fictions by the CPN for reasons of legal privilege, explore the relationship between aberrant antisocial behaviour among women and the multifaceted, unpredictable side effects of psychoactive prescription drugs and their more bizarre manifestations as criminal behaviour.