SOURCE: Fraser, Antonia. “Charting a Minefield.” Spectator 294, no. 9157 (7 February 2004): 30.

In the following review, Fraser offers a positive assessment of Brother and Sister, calling the work “a very fine and complex novel.”

The title of Joanna Trollope's new novel—Brother and Sister—arouses interesting Jacobean expectations. Is there a whiff of incest here to join the lesbian perfume of A Village Affair (a personal favourite, just ahead of The Rector's Wife)? But there is in fact no Jacobean incest along the lines of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. There is pity indeed from Trollope, in a very fine and complex novel, but the subject is the far more modern one of adoption. The brother and sister in question, David and Nathalie, are not blood relations, simply two babies given away by their mothers and adopted by the same woman, Lynne, whose husband cannot beget children. Legally, they are of...