Sisters. They can be the strongest of allies, the fiercest of enemies. In her latest novel, Wildflowers, Peggy Frew delves, with startlingly precise detail, deep into the fraught history and heartbreaking present of three girls born to Robert and Gwen Atkins.

Each girl has their assigned role within the family, informed by personality traits identified (or perhaps bestowed upon them) by their loving but frustratingly benign parents. Meg is the eldest, the fixer, the bossy one. Nina, the directionless ditherer who cannot articulate even to herself what she wants, has seemingly resigned herself to being the quiet, well-behaved one. Amber is the youngest, a beautiful, fierce, gloriously vivid chameleon and born actress, who plunges ardently into life and all its risks. It is Amber’s insatiable need to live her life large and loud that holds the rest of the family captive, no more so than when her descent into a heroin addiction begins to control not only her life, but all of their lives.

Frew has a singular, remarkable gift for writing human emotion; her characters live and breathe beyond the page. My heart ached for each and every one of them. Here is a group of people shaped by events beyond what may or may not have been within their power to control. It is left to us the readers to ponder, what would we have done? How far is too far to try and save those you love?

It seems to me that throughout the span of human history, there are few relationships more examined than the one between sisters. Bookstores everywhere contain multitudes of tomes dedicated to exploring the complex fragility and enormous resilience of the bond shared between girls born into the same families. Frew has done an exceptional job of ensuring her own novel glows like a gem among them.

Tye Cattanach is a bookseller at Readings Carlton.