Once We Were Sisters A Memoir

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, she returned to South Africa, determined to find answers and forced to reckon with his history of violence and the lingering effects of their most unusual childhood. Kohler recounts the lives she and her sister led in spare and incisive prose, flashing back to their privileged but difficult childhood in apartheid South Africa, marked by their father's death and a distant, suffocating mother. The memoir follows them from their Anglican boarding school to their studies in Rome and Paris, where they planned grand lives that were interrupted when they both married young and discovered they had made poor choices. Kohler evokes the enduring bond between sisters and is a powerful, heartbreaking portrait of an unspeakable loss.

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