Issue #0

Plot

This isn't the beginning. It's the end of your diary. I sneaked into your room and searched through the drawers in your desk until I found it. I smuggled the diary out, opened it, and leafed through it until I came to the first blank page, and now I've started to write. No, I haven't read what you've written. Really I haven't. Honestly not. There's probably a law against reading someone else's diary without permission. Maybe there's also a law against writing in someone else's diary. But I'm doing it anyway.

Six months after Luke's younger brother Marius died, their mother decides to hold a symbolic bonfire of all his possessions. Upset by the finality of her gesture, Luke decides that the only way to save his brothers diary is for him to start writing in it too, to fill in the blank pages and to make it more his than Marius's.

While filling the second half of the diary with the thoughts that he cannot share with his parents, Luke's curiosity becomes too great and he begins to read the text left by his brother. As the story progresses Luke reads the diary and discovers that he and Marius had more in common than he could have imagined, while his entries become his way of communicating to his brother the things they never said when they were both alive.

As he learns more about his brother, Luke begins to accept his own sexuality and comes closer to finding an answer to the question that tortures him: is he still a brother if there is no longer anyone left for him to be a brother to?

Brothers is a moving, skilfully written and poignant story about the voids which can exist even between family members and the tragedy of letting our differences divide us from those who should be closest to us. --Rachel Ediss