A forgotten Egyptian goddess: Rachel Louise Driscoll's The House of Two Sisters

Do you believe in curses? Might you be convinced of their reality if terrible things befell you and your family after an unheeded warning?

In Rachel Louise Driscoll’s elaborately woven debut, Clementine Attridge, daughter of an Egyptologist, was already inclined to accept the power of curses’ dark magic. Introverted yet strong-willed, Clemmie grew up immersed in myths, acting out scenarios about the sister-goddesses Isis and Nephthys during childhood playtime, and developed an expertise in hieroglyphs. At eighteen, she assists her father during his famous mummy-unwrapping parties: macabre entertainment for Victorian society gripped by all things Egyptian.

But after Clemmie translates the threatening inscription on an amulet found with an unusual mummified specimen, and her father disturbs the remains anyway, their lives are destroyed bit by bit. Five years later, she arrives in Cairo, desperate to hire a dahabeeyah – river barge – to carry her up the Nile and make amends before it’s too late.

The novel’s symbolism, drawing parallels between ancient deities and Clemmie’s family, is deep, rich, and extensive. It’s especially meaningful as it addresses Clemmie’s self-identification with the less-familiar sister: “For she is the Nephthys of her story, invisible and forgotten, and had she been a little more like Isis, then maybe her father would have listened to her.”

The storyline alternates between 1887 – the year of the “unwrapping” – and Clemmie’s journey in 1892, as she and a group of English visitors (whose company she reluctantly accepts) head upriver to Denderah. With the frequent circling back to five years ago and the time needed to establish context, the plot moves forward at a slowish pace, at least in the first half.

While the background detail will be catnip for Egyptology buffs (and cats are important characters!), the novel is as much an interior adventure as a voyage through the country and its storied culture. The characters, English and Egyptian, are a diverse sort, some more fully sketched than others. To allow for greater surprises, few specifics about the cast will be mentioned here, but the mythology provides hints.

For readers wanting to be transported into an earlier time, The House of Two Sisters places you amidst the Egyptomania craze of late 19th-century England and the exploitation of relics from the country’s past, both material and human. Moody and unsettling, this is a well-wrought Egyptian gothic with an echoing message about the ethics of people’s obsessions.

The House of Two Sisters will be published by Ballantine in June, and I read it from a NetGalley copy. The UK edition, published by Harvill Secker in February, is titled, very appropriately, Nephthys.