amous for her bestselling Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors focuses her talent in the novel Blue Sisters on delineating the lives of Avery, Bonnie and Lucky Blue, whose existence has been torn apart by the loss of their beloved sister, Nicky.

Although inevitable comparisons to Little Women have been noted by critics, it is more accurate to suggest that Mellors appears to be a 21st century Nora Ephron (whose sisters Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron helped to shape the famous New York-based screenwriter and novelist`s works).

While Mellors writes about a fictional set of sisters who have grown up in New York, the parallels to the writing of Nora Ephron and her sister Delia are unmistakeable. Blue Sisters, a novel of sisterhood, loss, anguish and healing, made it into the list of the New York Times bestsellers, and it is easy to see why.

The book situates its time-frame a year after Nicky overdosed on pain medication. She was the most pleasant and, ironically, the least problematic of the Blue family. The patriarch of the family was an alcoholic and their British-born mother maintained a stiff upper lip of stoicism and denial in the face of this dysfunctionality throughout her daughters` childhood.

In order to prove that she would be nothing like her parents, Avery became a high-powered lawyer, whereas Bonnie found satisfaction in the sport of boxing. Lucky, the most physically beautiful of thefour, took up modelling as a profession, eschewing the completion of high-school. By contrast, Nicky became a high-school teacher, who was much beloved by her students. One of the persistent and central tragedies at the heart of the novel is that the most emotionally healthy and least dysfunctional of the four sisters was claimed by death too soon.

While Avery is found to have overcome a dangerous heroin addiction, Lucky is both an alcoholic as well as a drug addict.

Naturally this affects her career; however, substance abuse is not the only social evil that mars the sisters` professions.

We are told that the far more clean-living and sober Bonnie left a successful boxing career due to an ignominious defeat. One sympathises with Bonnie`s predicament since she suffered that defeat a week after finding Nicky dead in the apartment they both shared.

Indeed, the passion that drove Bonnie to take up boxing is described in such informed detail by Mellors that, for many readers, she will undoubtedly rank as their favourite among the sisters.

Over the years, Bonnie gradually fell in love with her talented and quietly demanding trainer Pavel. While I will not give away the plot by commenting on whether they end up living happily ever after, readers will find themselves rooting for the couple as the plot of the novel gains momentum.

Avery and her sisters are perturbed to find that their parents wish to sell Nicky`s apartment, which has remained empty for a year since Bonnie took up a bouncer`s job on the West Coast after leaving the field of boxing shortly after her sister`s death. Ostensibly happily married to a woman of Indian descent and living in London, Avery returns to New York briefly in order to help her sisters pack up Nicky`s belongings.

None of them have remained unscathed due to sibling loss.

Avery`s problems after Nicky`s death range from kleptomania to infidelity. Lucky finds that the lure of drugs and alcohol has not only compromised her livelihood but also her health. Returning to the apartment proves to be cathartic for Bonnie, however. She returns to boxing, and attempts to help Lucky become clean and substance-free.

But unresolved tensions erupt as arguments between the siblingsgo from petty squabbling to outright vicious attacks. However, one realises that much of this is due to the manner in which death (and the bewilderment that follows it) tends to warp love, sometimes to a point where the sentiment becomes difficult to distinguish from hatred.

Bonnie, the sanest and strongest of the three is understandably distressed as Avery and Lucky blame each other for having messed up their respective lives. While the highly driven and responsible Avery and the footloose and fancy-free Lucky may seem to be opposites of each other, in point of fact, the sisters are all very alike loving, sensitive, emotional and talented.

Certainly, the loss of a sibling was no excuse for Avery to cheat on her admirable wife, Chiti. But the problem lay deeper, since the latter was ready for parenthood while Avery wasn`t. Nicky Blue suffered from severe endometriosis and was told that only a hysterectomy would put an end to the intense pain caused by the condition. This was a route Nicky did not wish to take, since she loved children and wanted one of her own.

It seems as if Mellors has kept the overwhelming majority of her novel`s machinations devoid of healthy mother-child bonds. The Blue sisters` mother did her best to give them a sound education in spite of financial difficulties but, in a moving conversation between mother and daughter, Avery wishes that her parent had reached out to her children more instead of simply making an obsession out of catering to their material needs.

Part of Avery`s aversion to becoming a mother stems from the fact that she did more than her fair share of parenting her younger sisters.

One cannot help but sympathise with her on this front, even if one disapproves of her stealing things (first from charity shops and then from high-end stores).

Bonnie was a world-class boxer before her defeat and, although she realises it is a long haul back to being as good as she once was, the reader applauds the point that she doesn`t lack grit and determination.

Some of the novel`s best scenes take place in the boxing ring, and it is easy to understand why the sport is both dangerously violent yet undeniably exciting. All three of the major characters are very welldeveloped, but Bonnie emerges as the true heroine of the book, implicitly underscoring the point that one does not need to be traditionally feminine in order to be a woman.

Indeed, one gets the sense that Lucky might have quit modelling even if she had been less prone to addiction. Mellors pulls no punches in stressing how strictly regimented and gruelling the lives of female models are their entire world is enslaved by the constraints of femininity. It is all too easy to understand why Lucky`s 5` 10`, 112 lb body collapses due to pressure at more than one juncture in the novel.

Mellors` prose is remarkably engaging and the pace of her novel never flags. Some scenes are especially memorable, such as when the threesisters irrationally cart a discarded pink Smeg refrigerator back to the apartment, simply because it reminds them forcibly of the lost Nicky. The writer manages to create a sense of pathos without slipping into cloying sentimentality, and her depiction of sibling rivalry is as authentic as her portrayal of sisterly love.

The happy epilogue is situated 10 years after the main time-frame of the book; however, Blue Sisters is so engrossing that one hopes for a sequel that dwells on what happened in the intervening years.

The reviewer is associate professor of social sciences and liberal arts at the Institute ofBusiness Administration.

She has authored two collections of short stories, Timeless College Tales and Perennial College Tales, and a play, The Political Chess King