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A Memoir
by Sheila Kohler
Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death.
When 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.
"Starred Review. In spare, delicate prose, Kohler brings a seasoned novelist's skills to this deeply moving, compelling memoir." - Kirkus
"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
"The most striking parts of this rich and poignant memoir - rich above all in sensual experience - reflect on the necessary cruelty of the writer's art, sacrificing the truth of the world to the truth of fiction." - J.M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
"Throughout her literary career, Sheila Kohler has obsessively tried to find closure and justice for her sister's untimely death and, finally, in this memoir she has succeeded in coming to terms with the tragedy by movingly recalling their childhood together and expressing her love for her sister." - Lily Tuck, National Book Award-winning author of The Double Life of Liliane
"For unto whom much is given, of him shall be much required: this Biblical verse takes on a tragic ring as this memoir of a privileged childhood ends in murder. Sheila Kohler has put together this heartfelt, suspenseful confession with a lifetime's worth of skill and an abundance of inborn genius." - Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story
"Sheila Kohler's writing is visually potent, viscerally compelling, and intensely personal. In Once We Were Sisters she conjures a lost world of privilege, violence, and repression that has chilling parallels in contemporary life." - Rebecca Miller, author of Personal Velocity
"This lean memoir cuts straight to the heart of what it is to love - and lose - a sister. Kohler sidesteps nothing; her private rage, regret, heartbreak, and revelation mingle unforgettably with the public shame of apartheid. Once We Were Sisters is an exquisite and devastating book." - Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ordinary Light
This information about Once We Were Sisters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of fourteen works of fiction including the novels Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Cracks, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and made into a film starring Eva Green. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and O Magazine and included in The Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O'Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
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