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Once We Were Sisters
Sheila Kohler
€ 4.99
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Description for Once We Were Sisters
Hardcover. A powerful and heartbreaking portrait of the bond between two sisters, in life and beyond death Num Pages: 256 pages. BIC Classification: 1HFMS; BM; VFJX. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 145 x 223 x 33. Weight in Grams: 388. Fine in fine dustwrapper. Dustwrapper has some minor shelf wear, otherwise as new
Once We Were Sisters is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler. Growing up in the suffocating gentility of 1950s South Africa, the girls plan grand lives for themselves that will bring them out of the long shadow cast by their father's death and their overbearing mother's bullying. Maxine is just shy of her fortieth birthday when her husband, a brilliant and respected surgeon, drives their car off the road and kills her. Devastated, Sheila returns to South Africa, determined to find answers to her sister's sudden death at the hands of her husband. More haunting, however, are the questions. How had she failed to protect her sister? Was Maxine's murder a matter of accident, or destiny? What lies in the soil of their troubled motherland that condemns its women to such violence? Powerful, moving and tragic, Once We Were Sisters is an act of love, an extraordinary account of an unspeakable loss.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2017
Publisher
Canongate Books
Condition
Used, Like New
Number of Pages
256
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781782119975
SKU
KCG0000906
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-1
About Sheila Kohler
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. www.sheilakohler.com
Reviews for 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
An extraordinary memoir of loss . . . tender and powerful
Observer
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
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
Guardian
An extraordinary memoir of loss . . . tender and powerful
Observer
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
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