Once We Were Sisters

This is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler, two sisters who grew up in the suffocating gentility of 1950s South Africa. When Maxine is just shy of her fortieth birthday her husband, a brilliant and respected surgeon, drives their car off the road and kills her. Devastated, Sheila returns to the country of her birth, haunted by questions. How had she failed to protect her sister? Was Maxine’s death a matter of chance, or destiny? What lies in the soil of their troubled motherland that condemns its women to such violence?

Reviews of Once We Were Sisters

A powerful memoir from an acclaimed novelist reveals a past of privilege, violence and possibly murder … This many-layered memoir, rich in texture and suggestion, executed with a novelist's eye for oblique human suffering, is her devastating reckoning with the past * Guardian * A powerful memoir of love, loss and the author's failure to protect her beloved sister … the result is wonderful – spare, controlled and immensely resonant … a compact little gem * Sunday Times * An extraordinary memoir of loss … tender and powerful * Observer * Engrossing and beautifully written * Sunday Express * An elegant book, and a story that packs a mighty punch … A powerful meditation not only on loss and grief but also on complicity within a family and a country … Both horrifying and illuminating, and which lingers in the reader's consciousness long after the final page has been turned — Gillian Slovo * Times Literary Supplement * This is a memoir of love, sorrow, sisterhood and privilege. It's also a memoir of the limitations of such privilege – in particular, the inescapable tragedy of being born female in a patriarchal world, where all the money, beauty and breeding cannot protect you from a man who takes what he wants without consequence * New York Times * A rich and poignant memoir — J M COETZEE A pleasurable book, both because of its sinuous prose and because of its setting … the present tense has a poetic power, turning many of the scenes into visual set pieces * Telegraph * Beautiful and disturbing … It is a tragic tale, with echoes of cultural sexism and misogyny, yet a triumphant story of a young woman's liberation from this culture and her emergence as a writer — JOYCE CAROL OATES Kohler digs into her past for a searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly … Her powerful story gives a sharp contrast between a sister's lasting love and the ways society protects a violent man * BBC, Ten Books to Read in 2017 *