Ali Ahearn insists the story of feuding sisters in her new book in no way resembles her relationship with her own sibling.

In Sister Pact, two sisters, long estranged after an unimaginable betrayal, have to participate as a team in a gruelling reality television program in order to receive a huge inheritance from their game-show loving grandmother.

The Samford Valley writer says the only element of Sister Pact she shares with her sister is a co-author credit with her sibling Ros Baxter.

“I guess people who know us will know who wrote which sister, but the sisters (in Sister Pact) are pretty crazy girls and we’re pretty normal suburbanites with a middle class upbringing,” Ali jokes.

“So there’s nothing autobiographical about their relationship at all.”

Ahearn described the experience of co-writing a novel with Baxter as “an absolute delight”, because the sisters were “both on the same page”.

“I guess it helped that the other person was my sister, in that we have very similar tastes in reading and the way that we think,” she said.

“There was just so much synchronicity on this and it was really was quite amazing.

“I think it would be more difficult to co-author a book with somebody that you didn’t know very well, but certainly this (writing experience) was fun, we had a good time and it was a lot easier than even I thought it would be.”

Ali, who usually writes medical romance novels under the pen name Amy Andrews, revelled in the chance to “flex my creative muscles” in a different genre.

“It’s the sort of stuff that I like to read, contemporary women’s fiction and romantic comedy, so it was a very familiar style for me, so I didn’t really have any problems clicking in to that mode,” she said. 

“I actually enjoyed it because it was different to the way that I would normally write my medical romance stories.”

Sister Pact is out now through Harper Collins and is also available from http://www.amazon.com/ and http://www.sisterlit.com/