Once We Were Sisters. By Sheila Kohler. Read a sample Read a sample Description; Details; Reviews; 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.' —People When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping. Details A beautiful, heartrending literary memoir about the tragic death of the author's beloved older sister and a tribute to their bond.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.
- When Big Brothers Big Sisters works to match a Little with a Big, we take into account the needs, personality, interests, and goals of both the child and the adult volunteer. We introduce the Little and his or her family to the Big slowly and make sure everyone is fully committed to the match before it is made official.
- Once We Were Sisters is a memoir/biography written by Sheila Kohler about her relationship with her sister as well as her sister's tragic death via car accident/alleged murder.
- Like all of Sheila Kohler’s prose work, Once We Were Sisters reveals its story by degrees, amid a richly sensuous milieu of South African white privilege and repression. 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.
Once We Were Sisters Audiobook
Book Summary
Once We Were Sisters Summary
Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death.
Sister Nicolina Kohler
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.