About this item

ONE OF PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S BEST NEW BOOKS"A searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly." - The BBC"An intimate illumination of sisterhood and loss." - PeopleWhen Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. Stunned by the news, she immediately flew back to the country where she was born, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood - one marked by death and the misguided love of their mother.In her signature spare and incisive prose, Sheila Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led. Flashing back to their storybook childhood at the family estate, Crossways, Kohler tells of the death of her father when she and Maxine were girls, which led to the family abandoning their house and the girls being raised by their mother, at turns distant and suffocating. We follow them to the cloistered Anglican boarding school where they first learn of separation and later their studies in Rome and Paris where they plan grand lives for themselves - lives that are interrupted when both marry young and discover they have made poor choices. Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death."A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended." - Joyce Carol Oates



About the Author

Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the younger of two girls. Upon matriculation at 17 from Saint Andrews, with a distinction in history (1958) , she left the country for Europe. She lived for 15 years in Paris, where she married, did her undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne, and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three girls, she moved to the USA in 1981, and did an MFA in writing at Columbia. In the summer of 1987, her first published story, "The Mountain," came out in "The Quarterly" and received an O'Henry prize and was published in the O'Henry Prize Stories of 1988. It also became the first chapter in her first novel, "The Perfect Place," which was published by Knopf the next year.



Read Next Recommendation

Report incorrect product information.