Quick Take
- Narration: Adepero Oduye’s deadpan precision is essential to this novel, she delivers Korede’s controlled, sardonic observations with exactly the restraint the dark comedy requires.
- Themes: Sibling loyalty, beauty privilege, complicity and moral erosion
- Mood: Darkly comic, tightly coiled, and quietly devastating
- Verdict: Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut is a very short, very sharp novel that earns every one of its award nominations, Adepero Oduye’s performance makes it essential in audio form.
I finished My Sister, the Serial Killer on a Thursday afternoon at my desk, in the gap between two other things I was supposed to be doing. It took me four hours and fifteen minutes. That is not long enough for the feeling it leaves behind, which is the particular unease of having laughed at something you should perhaps not have found funny, and then having that laughter complicating your understanding of what the book is actually about.
Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize, is set in Lagos, Nigeria. Korede is a nurse, meticulous and pragmatic. Her younger sister Ayoola is beautiful and sociopathic and has now killed three boyfriends. The novel begins with Korede cleaning up the third scene, which she is very good at. The premise is given to us in the first pages with remarkable efficiency, and the novel never wastes a word after that.
Our Take on My Sister, the Serial Killer
What the synopsis describes as “deadpan wit” is more accurately a voice so controlled that the humor and the horror occupy exactly the same space without resolving. Korede is not unaware of what Ayoola is doing. She is not naive. She has made a choice, repeatedly, incrementally, to prioritize their bond over the lives of Ayoola’s victims, and Braithwaite writes that choice with a precision that implicates the reader as thoroughly as it implicates Korede. You find yourself rooting for Korede to cover the tracks more effectively. Then you notice you are doing that. Then the novel moves on before you can fully process it.
The Lagos setting is integral rather than atmospheric. The patriarchal social structures of Nigerian society, Ayoola’s beauty as a form of currency, the knife she inherited from a father whose violence shaped both sisters, give the novel a specific cultural grounding that prevents it from being a generic dark comedy. One reviewer notes that there is “a lot more going on after scratching the surface of the patriarchal society where the two sisters live” and that is an understatement. The knife is not a symbol; it is a history.
Why Listen to My Sister, the Serial Killer
Adepero Oduye’s narration is the single most important reason to choose audio for this book. The novel is written in very short chapters, sometimes a page or less, and the journal-like quality of Korede’s first-person voice lives or dies by the narrator’s ability to modulate tone within a register that stays perpetually controlled. Oduye does this with remarkable discipline. She delivers Korede’s observations about blood-cleaning techniques with the same inflection she uses for observations about love, and that refusal to signal which register matters more is exactly what the text requires.
The brevity of the chapters also makes this an audiobook that suits listening in fragments, the stop points are natural and frequent, which means you can listen in a long sitting or across a week without losing the thread. Either way, the cumulative effect is the same.
What to Watch For in My Sister, the Serial Killer
Some readers find the narrative’s predictability, at a structural level, the trajectory of events is not difficult to anticipate, a drawback. One reviewer describes it as “interesting/part predictable” and notes the style requires some adjustment. That is fair: the novel’s power is not in plot surprise but in the slow-burn psychological portrait of a woman who knows exactly what she is enabling and does it anyway. If you need narrative unpredictability to stay engaged, the four-hour runtime may test your patience. If you find psychological precision more compelling than plot mechanics, this is one of the more rewarding short novels of the past decade.
Who Should Listen to My Sister, the Serial Killer
Literary fiction listeners who enjoyed books like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, morally compromised, first-person, deadpan, will find this a natural companion. Fans of dark comedy crime who can engage with fiction that is more interested in complicity than whodunit will be well-served. The four-hour runtime makes it a low-commitment entry point. Listeners expecting a traditional thriller with plot twists and investigative momentum should look elsewhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is My Sister, the Serial Killer a mystery novel in the traditional sense, is there a detective or investigation?
No. The reader knows from the opening pages who the killer is. The novel’s tension comes from Korede’s moral position as Ayoola’s enabler and cover-up artist, not from the question of whodunit. It is closer to psychological literary fiction than procedural crime.
How graphic is the violence in this audiobook?
The violence is understated rather than graphic. Braithwaite handles the killings with the same deadpan economy as the rest of the prose, they register more as facts than as set pieces. The effect is more unsettling than a graphic approach would be, but listeners sensitive to violence need not worry about detailed descriptions.
Does Adepero Oduye differentiate between Korede’s voice and Ayoola’s in the narration?
The novel is entirely from Korede’s first-person perspective, so Oduye’s primary task is sustaining Korede’s controlled, sardonic register consistently. Ayoola’s dialogue is rendered with a distinct lightness that contrasts with Korede’s gravity, Oduye handles this contrast well.
At just over four hours, is My Sister, the Serial Killer too short to feel complete?
The novel was written at novella length deliberately, and most readers find the brevity is a feature. The short chapter structure creates a compressed, pressurized feel that a longer book would dilute. The ending has divided readers, some find it abrupt; others feel it is the only honest conclusion. At four hours, it asks very little of your time and delivers proportionally more than its length suggests.
