Download high-resolution image Look inside
Listen to a clip from the audiobook
audio play button
0:00
0:00

Dual Citizens

A novel

Author Alix Ohlin
Look inside
Listen to a clip from the audiobook
audio play button
0:00
0:00
Dual Citizensis both a powerful coming-of-age story and an achingly poignant portrait of the strange, painful, and ultimately life-sustaining bonds between sisters.

Lark and Robin are half-sisters: Lark, shy and studious; Robin, wild and artistic. Raised in Montreal by their disinterested single mother, they form a fierce team regardless of their differences. As they grow up, Lark excels at school and Robin becomes an extraordinary pianist. Then, at seventeen, Lark flees to America to attend college, where she finds her calling in documentary films, and her sister soon joins her.

But in New York City, they find themselves tested: Lark struggles with self-doubt, and Robin chafes against the demands of Juilliard. Under pressure, their bond grows strained and ultimately is broken, and their paths abruptly diverge. Years later, Lark’s life is in tatters and Robin’s is wilder than ever. As Lark tries to take charge of her destiny, she discovers that despite the difficulties of their relationship, there is only one person she can truly rely on: her sister.

In this gripping, unforgettable novel about art, ambition, sisterhood, motherhood, and self-knowledge, Dual Citizens captures the unique language of sisters and makes visible the imperceptible strings that bind us to the ones we love for good.
 
“I hesitate to call Dual Citizens Alix Ohlin’s best book—because her previous ones are among my favorite recent works of fiction—but it’s perhaps her most entrancing. This is a spellbinding, fever-dream of a tale that will leave you forever changed, and will surely earn Ohlin a place among the greatest writers of our generation. I loved it.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
 
“Ohlin’s story of sisters wraps its tendrils deep as any family. Dual Citizens leads a reader through landscapes of compassion and crisis in this deeply felt, iridescent novel of the spells and surprises a sibling creates.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
 
“There’s so much life in this novel! Alix Ohlin is such an effortless, absorbing stylist, and with Dual Citizens she has given us a story about family and sacrifice that will give readers a great deal to consider. It’s a wonderful book that you will want to share.” —Owen King, author of Double Feature
 
“For long-time admirers of Alix Ohlin’s fiction, the psychological complexity and keen observations in this novel will come as no surprise. In Dual Citizens, Ohlin examines the conflicting desires of two sisters from Montreal with a riveting precision reminiscent of fellow Montreal native Mavis Gallant. However, unlike Gallant’s Montreal girls, Ohlin’s are not of a generation ‘trained to be patient’ but to follow their ambitions. A lifelong witness to one’s shifting longings, this wise and luminous novel shows, is a sibling.” —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
 
“Alix Ohlin is a thrilling and singular writer who intimately captures and celebrates a lifetime of desires, disappointments, and everyday triumphs in these two sisters’ lives. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: Dual Citizens will take up residency in your mind and heart for quite some time.”  —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers
 
“This novel sneaks up on you the way life does—full of chance and yearning. It’s a precise, subtle, sad and graceful story about how we care for each other, and how we try to, and how we fail.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
 
“Touching. . . . Dual Citizens has a lot in common with Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Evocative . . . traces [its] characters over long arcs of time and place with equal amounts grace and wit. Most revelatory is the way that each [sister] fights to find her own life as an artist outside the expectations of others and the demands of a male-dominated world.” —Rebecca Bengal, Vogue

“[A] compulsive read. . . . Ohlin asks questions about sisterhood, motherhood and self-knowledge in this novel about how we care for one another.” —The Globe and Mail

“[An] engrossing, intricate tale. . . . Ohlin smartly chooses a broad scope and expertly weaves disparate lives into a singular thread, making for an exceptional depiction of the bond between sisters.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“[Dual Citizens] is a lovely, deeply moving work. A lyrical account of the lives of two women, their failures and hopes, and ultimately their quiet redemption. . . . [Ohlin] asks smart, complicated questions not only about family, but also about the nature of narrative itself—whether in literature or in film—about the difference between artifice and truth and the meaning of nostalgia.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Luminous. . . . Ohlin’s touching, beautifully crafted story traces the unbreakable bond holding the sisters together, even when miles apart, through many changes.” —Booklist

“Ohlin’s prose and insight are luminous. . . . As with her prior novel, Inside, Ohlin is adroit at articulating her characters’ internal dialogues, and it becomes apparent to the reader as it does to both women that they are at their most harmonious when connected to each other.” —Shelf Awareness

“Alix Ohlin’s gorgeously understated writing brings her characters to vivid, brilliant life, especially fiercely loyal and socially awkward Lark, who felt like someone we’d love to be friends with.” —Apple Books Canada

Prologue

The story of Scottie’s life—which is, of course, the story of my life too—begins with my sister Robin. It’s strange how little we talk about it now. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who dwells on our history, probably because I’m the one who chose and formed it. If I bring up that day in the Laurentians, Robin says she doesn’t remember much about it. I find this impossible to imagine. For me, the opposite is true, with every detail lodged unwaveringly in my memory, recorded in detail, like a film I can replay at any time.

It goes like this: a sunny day in June, the leafy heat of summer at odds with my frozen terror as I stood fixed to the ground. The air thick and still as a wall against Robin’s ragged breath.

And the wolf my sister had named Catherine inspecting us both with her yellow eyes.

Robin was thirty-eight weeks pregnant at the time, and she’d just irritably informed me that pregnancy lasted ten months, not nine. She was angry about this, as if there had been a conspiracy to keep her misinformed. She was angry in general, because she was hot and uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep. We were walking down a trail behind her house that led to a canopy of pine trees, hoping the air would be cooler there. Walking was all Robin wanted to do, although she complained about this, too: her hips hurt, her knees hurt, her ribs hurt. Complaining wasn’t typical of my sister, who was stoically, even savagely independent, and it worried me. We stopped every few steps so she could catch her breath, and when we did, I watched her stroke her belly; she wasn’t in other ways tender toward the baby inside her, or herself.

She frowned. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”


“You’re touching yourself,” she said.


I hadn’t realized until then that I was imitating her, making myself a mirror. My palm was at against my own stomach, though there was nothing to stroke. I flushed with embarrassment, and my sister gave her harsh bark of a laugh.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I get it.”

But how could she get it? She didn’t live in my body any more than I could live in hers. We stood body to body, sister to sister, across an impossible divide.

To change the subject, I began telling her about a cache of old films that had been discovered in a permafrost landfill beneath an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. Dating from the early twentieth century, the films had belonged to a movie house. Back in those days, I said, movies traveled from California to cities like Calgary and Vancouver before heading to Whitehorse and eventually reaching the mining community in Dawson City, at which point it made no sense to ship them back to their point of origin. So they accumulated there, an accidental archive. The films were made of cellulose nitrate, a material known to disintegrate, melt, even spontaneously combust. If they hadn’t been buried below the rink—nestled alongside chicken wire and dirt and bits of wooden debris—they might have burned the whole town down.

“Movies used to explode?” Robin said.

I nodded. I told her how the movie house went out of business and dumped the films, which were found decades later by a backhoe operator clearing the land for a new recreation center. The story fascinated me, with its unlikely combination of flammable film and icy bedrock, of preservation by neglect, how a town had maintained its history by forgetting it. Most silent films of that era have been lost to fire or decay, but abandonment saved these ones. As for my sister, she’d heard me go on about this kind of trivia for years—I was a collector of arcane information, especially anything relating to film—and I suppose she must have been used to it. She was listening now, so quietly that it took me longer than it should have to notice something was wrong.

Her eyes were trained on a point behind my head. “Look,” she said.

We saw the wolf trot out of the forest like a lost dog looking for its home. From her strange gait, one leg hobbled, we knew it was Catherine. Her grey-brown fur looked knotted and flat, her body narrow-hipped and sinewy. It was possible, we thought later, that she was searching for her pack. To me it hardly matters; her motives aren’t my concern. What I remember is her graceless stagger, and how quickly she moved despite it. How when she bore down on us, so close that I could see her eyes, I couldn’t tell whether she recognized us, whether the bond Robin had nurtured with her was sturdy, or significant, or the slightest bit present in her mind.

What happened next was my fault.

The wolf ran toward Robin as if to jump on her, and I pulled my sister sharply to the side, scared for both her and the baby. Robin wrestled against me—wanting to greet Catherine, I guess, or at least to see her close-up. A fit of vertigo washed over me then, the sky and earth changing places; everything solid jellied and spun. I clung to whatever I could grasp as my vision hazed, and inside my ears was the crash and roll of some invisible ocean. I think I grabbed Robin’s shoulder, but it might have been her leg—that’s how disoriented I was. In the push and pull between us Robin lost her balance, stumbled, and fell. The wolf kept going, running past us as if we didn’t even exist.

Slowly my eyes cleared, and the ground assembled itself beneath me. Vertigo passing is like an earthquake in reverse: pieces knit them- selves back together, the world unshudders and comes to rest.

Next to me, Robin moaned, a terrible, keening sound. 
“Are you all right?” I said. 
She didn’t answer. Her face was an ashy color I’d never seen before, and she pressed a hand to her belly again, the gesture not gentle this time.

I cradled my sister’s head in my lap but she seemed hardly to notice my presence, much less be eased by it. Her body was hot to my touch, her hair sticking wetly to my hand.

Then we heard the rest of the pack begin to vocalize in rolling harmonics, whether in greeting to Catherine or for some other reason. Their silvery howls rose and fell, rose and fell. I thought it was spooky, but Robin’s face relaxed and she opened her eyes. What I found wild, she found a comfort, and that had always been a difference between us.

“Where’s Catherine?” she said.

I told her I didn’t know; the wolf had gone. My sister struggled to sit up, and I could see she was hurting, but there was no stopping her from standing. There had never been any stopping Robin from whatever she wanted to do. She got to her feet, though her knees buckled once and she had to brace herself against me as I tried and failed to coax her back to the house.

Only my sister would have ignored going into labor in order to look for a wolf. Only my sister would have asked, through the pain, “Where did she go?”

  • SHORTLIST | 2019
    Scotiabank Giller Prize
© Emily Cooper

Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, including Dual Citizens, which was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.

View titles by Alix Ohlin

About

Dual Citizensis both a powerful coming-of-age story and an achingly poignant portrait of the strange, painful, and ultimately life-sustaining bonds between sisters.

Lark and Robin are half-sisters: Lark, shy and studious; Robin, wild and artistic. Raised in Montreal by their disinterested single mother, they form a fierce team regardless of their differences. As they grow up, Lark excels at school and Robin becomes an extraordinary pianist. Then, at seventeen, Lark flees to America to attend college, where she finds her calling in documentary films, and her sister soon joins her.

But in New York City, they find themselves tested: Lark struggles with self-doubt, and Robin chafes against the demands of Juilliard. Under pressure, their bond grows strained and ultimately is broken, and their paths abruptly diverge. Years later, Lark’s life is in tatters and Robin’s is wilder than ever. As Lark tries to take charge of her destiny, she discovers that despite the difficulties of their relationship, there is only one person she can truly rely on: her sister.

In this gripping, unforgettable novel about art, ambition, sisterhood, motherhood, and self-knowledge, Dual Citizens captures the unique language of sisters and makes visible the imperceptible strings that bind us to the ones we love for good.
 
“I hesitate to call Dual Citizens Alix Ohlin’s best book—because her previous ones are among my favorite recent works of fiction—but it’s perhaps her most entrancing. This is a spellbinding, fever-dream of a tale that will leave you forever changed, and will surely earn Ohlin a place among the greatest writers of our generation. I loved it.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
 
“Ohlin’s story of sisters wraps its tendrils deep as any family. Dual Citizens leads a reader through landscapes of compassion and crisis in this deeply felt, iridescent novel of the spells and surprises a sibling creates.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
 
“There’s so much life in this novel! Alix Ohlin is such an effortless, absorbing stylist, and with Dual Citizens she has given us a story about family and sacrifice that will give readers a great deal to consider. It’s a wonderful book that you will want to share.” —Owen King, author of Double Feature
 
“For long-time admirers of Alix Ohlin’s fiction, the psychological complexity and keen observations in this novel will come as no surprise. In Dual Citizens, Ohlin examines the conflicting desires of two sisters from Montreal with a riveting precision reminiscent of fellow Montreal native Mavis Gallant. However, unlike Gallant’s Montreal girls, Ohlin’s are not of a generation ‘trained to be patient’ but to follow their ambitions. A lifelong witness to one’s shifting longings, this wise and luminous novel shows, is a sibling.” —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
 
“Alix Ohlin is a thrilling and singular writer who intimately captures and celebrates a lifetime of desires, disappointments, and everyday triumphs in these two sisters’ lives. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: Dual Citizens will take up residency in your mind and heart for quite some time.”  —Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers
 
“This novel sneaks up on you the way life does—full of chance and yearning. It’s a precise, subtle, sad and graceful story about how we care for each other, and how we try to, and how we fail.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
 
“Touching. . . . Dual Citizens has a lot in common with Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Evocative . . . traces [its] characters over long arcs of time and place with equal amounts grace and wit. Most revelatory is the way that each [sister] fights to find her own life as an artist outside the expectations of others and the demands of a male-dominated world.” —Rebecca Bengal, Vogue

“[A] compulsive read. . . . Ohlin asks questions about sisterhood, motherhood and self-knowledge in this novel about how we care for one another.” —The Globe and Mail

“[An] engrossing, intricate tale. . . . Ohlin smartly chooses a broad scope and expertly weaves disparate lives into a singular thread, making for an exceptional depiction of the bond between sisters.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“[Dual Citizens] is a lovely, deeply moving work. A lyrical account of the lives of two women, their failures and hopes, and ultimately their quiet redemption. . . . [Ohlin] asks smart, complicated questions not only about family, but also about the nature of narrative itself—whether in literature or in film—about the difference between artifice and truth and the meaning of nostalgia.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Luminous. . . . Ohlin’s touching, beautifully crafted story traces the unbreakable bond holding the sisters together, even when miles apart, through many changes.” —Booklist

“Ohlin’s prose and insight are luminous. . . . As with her prior novel, Inside, Ohlin is adroit at articulating her characters’ internal dialogues, and it becomes apparent to the reader as it does to both women that they are at their most harmonious when connected to each other.” —Shelf Awareness

“Alix Ohlin’s gorgeously understated writing brings her characters to vivid, brilliant life, especially fiercely loyal and socially awkward Lark, who felt like someone we’d love to be friends with.” —Apple Books Canada

Excerpt

Prologue

The story of Scottie’s life—which is, of course, the story of my life too—begins with my sister Robin. It’s strange how little we talk about it now. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who dwells on our history, probably because I’m the one who chose and formed it. If I bring up that day in the Laurentians, Robin says she doesn’t remember much about it. I find this impossible to imagine. For me, the opposite is true, with every detail lodged unwaveringly in my memory, recorded in detail, like a film I can replay at any time.

It goes like this: a sunny day in June, the leafy heat of summer at odds with my frozen terror as I stood fixed to the ground. The air thick and still as a wall against Robin’s ragged breath.

And the wolf my sister had named Catherine inspecting us both with her yellow eyes.

Robin was thirty-eight weeks pregnant at the time, and she’d just irritably informed me that pregnancy lasted ten months, not nine. She was angry about this, as if there had been a conspiracy to keep her misinformed. She was angry in general, because she was hot and uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep. We were walking down a trail behind her house that led to a canopy of pine trees, hoping the air would be cooler there. Walking was all Robin wanted to do, although she complained about this, too: her hips hurt, her knees hurt, her ribs hurt. Complaining wasn’t typical of my sister, who was stoically, even savagely independent, and it worried me. We stopped every few steps so she could catch her breath, and when we did, I watched her stroke her belly; she wasn’t in other ways tender toward the baby inside her, or herself.

She frowned. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”


“You’re touching yourself,” she said.


I hadn’t realized until then that I was imitating her, making myself a mirror. My palm was at against my own stomach, though there was nothing to stroke. I flushed with embarrassment, and my sister gave her harsh bark of a laugh.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I get it.”

But how could she get it? She didn’t live in my body any more than I could live in hers. We stood body to body, sister to sister, across an impossible divide.

To change the subject, I began telling her about a cache of old films that had been discovered in a permafrost landfill beneath an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. Dating from the early twentieth century, the films had belonged to a movie house. Back in those days, I said, movies traveled from California to cities like Calgary and Vancouver before heading to Whitehorse and eventually reaching the mining community in Dawson City, at which point it made no sense to ship them back to their point of origin. So they accumulated there, an accidental archive. The films were made of cellulose nitrate, a material known to disintegrate, melt, even spontaneously combust. If they hadn’t been buried below the rink—nestled alongside chicken wire and dirt and bits of wooden debris—they might have burned the whole town down.

“Movies used to explode?” Robin said.

I nodded. I told her how the movie house went out of business and dumped the films, which were found decades later by a backhoe operator clearing the land for a new recreation center. The story fascinated me, with its unlikely combination of flammable film and icy bedrock, of preservation by neglect, how a town had maintained its history by forgetting it. Most silent films of that era have been lost to fire or decay, but abandonment saved these ones. As for my sister, she’d heard me go on about this kind of trivia for years—I was a collector of arcane information, especially anything relating to film—and I suppose she must have been used to it. She was listening now, so quietly that it took me longer than it should have to notice something was wrong.

Her eyes were trained on a point behind my head. “Look,” she said.

We saw the wolf trot out of the forest like a lost dog looking for its home. From her strange gait, one leg hobbled, we knew it was Catherine. Her grey-brown fur looked knotted and flat, her body narrow-hipped and sinewy. It was possible, we thought later, that she was searching for her pack. To me it hardly matters; her motives aren’t my concern. What I remember is her graceless stagger, and how quickly she moved despite it. How when she bore down on us, so close that I could see her eyes, I couldn’t tell whether she recognized us, whether the bond Robin had nurtured with her was sturdy, or significant, or the slightest bit present in her mind.

What happened next was my fault.

The wolf ran toward Robin as if to jump on her, and I pulled my sister sharply to the side, scared for both her and the baby. Robin wrestled against me—wanting to greet Catherine, I guess, or at least to see her close-up. A fit of vertigo washed over me then, the sky and earth changing places; everything solid jellied and spun. I clung to whatever I could grasp as my vision hazed, and inside my ears was the crash and roll of some invisible ocean. I think I grabbed Robin’s shoulder, but it might have been her leg—that’s how disoriented I was. In the push and pull between us Robin lost her balance, stumbled, and fell. The wolf kept going, running past us as if we didn’t even exist.

Slowly my eyes cleared, and the ground assembled itself beneath me. Vertigo passing is like an earthquake in reverse: pieces knit them- selves back together, the world unshudders and comes to rest.

Next to me, Robin moaned, a terrible, keening sound. 
“Are you all right?” I said. 
She didn’t answer. Her face was an ashy color I’d never seen before, and she pressed a hand to her belly again, the gesture not gentle this time.

I cradled my sister’s head in my lap but she seemed hardly to notice my presence, much less be eased by it. Her body was hot to my touch, her hair sticking wetly to my hand.

Then we heard the rest of the pack begin to vocalize in rolling harmonics, whether in greeting to Catherine or for some other reason. Their silvery howls rose and fell, rose and fell. I thought it was spooky, but Robin’s face relaxed and she opened her eyes. What I found wild, she found a comfort, and that had always been a difference between us.

“Where’s Catherine?” she said.

I told her I didn’t know; the wolf had gone. My sister struggled to sit up, and I could see she was hurting, but there was no stopping her from standing. There had never been any stopping Robin from whatever she wanted to do. She got to her feet, though her knees buckled once and she had to brace herself against me as I tried and failed to coax her back to the house.

Only my sister would have ignored going into labor in order to look for a wolf. Only my sister would have asked, through the pain, “Where did she go?”

Awards

  • SHORTLIST | 2019
    Scotiabank Giller Prize

Author

© Emily Cooper

Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, including Dual Citizens, which was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.

View titles by Alix Ohlin