The Twins: A Domestic Novel

In the drowsy seaside town of Burleigh-Singleton, where respectability serves as both currency and camouflage, two brothers are born of the same womb but destined for vastly different ends. Charles is gentle, good, inclined toward quiet virtue. Julian is impulsive, resentful, inclined toward darker impulses. They share a mother, a father returned from India after years of absence, and a future tangled inexorably with a young woman named Emily Warren, beautiful and wealthy enough to make brothers enemies. As family secrets surface and the twins' contrasting natures collide, the novel darkens toward tragedy, revealing what happens when jealousy curdles into something irrevocable. Tupper writes with sharp eye for the hypocrisies of provincial English life, where good consciences and small incomes go hand in hand, and where the dullest exteriors often conceal the most explosive domestic dramas. A forgotten Victorian novel of manners, moral failure, and the deadly cost of sibling rivalry.