Sara Freeman is a Montreal-born writer currently based out of Boston. She graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction in 2013.
Freeman's new novel is
Tides.
At Lit Hub she tagged six "novels that explore the blurry psychic boundaries of sibling intimacy" including:
Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden
This is the darkest, most claustrophobic of the novels on this list. Four siblings, ranging from ages six to seventeen, go to great lengths to cover up the fact of their mother’s death in order to stay together in their childhood home. Our narrator, Jack, is fifteen and nearly superstitious about his filth. He nurses a 
fascination for his beautiful older sister, Julie, and masturbates nearly constantly. Time bloats in the stagnant, increasingly malodorous house, and the kitchen, in particular, becomes ‘a place of stench and clouds of flies’. The four children, in their private pact against the outside world, play-act, fight, laugh, and slowly regress to a primitive, feral state. Encouraged by his older sisters, the youngest child, Tom, takes to acting like an infant girl, sleeping in an old cot attached to the eldest sister’s bed. Their eerie idyll is threatened when Derek, Julie’s snooker champion boyfriend enters the frame. This increasingly disquieting story culminates in a fantastically shocking final perversion, which is permanently seared in this reader’s mind. Not for the faint of heart.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
The Cement Garden is among
Jeff Somers's ten literary kids with extremely difficult childhoods.
--Marshal Zeringue
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