From the Marx Brothers to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, siblings have a funny way of stealing the show. In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, brothers and sisters are the “first evidence” and “last confirmation” of love – but in other books, riding solo wins out. “Part of the joy of being a novelist,” writes Cólm Tóibín, in the LRB essay collection, Sisters Come Second, “is to erase all trace of siblinghood”. The US calendar marks 10 April as National Sibling Day, but Europeans who choose to celebrate have a little longer to wait (it’s 31 May ).
***
