Showing results by author "Sheila Kohler" in All Categories

When Sheila Kohler was 37, 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.

The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children are dead. A father is sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son is destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women are reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent.

A powerful and heart-breaking portrait of the bond between two sisters, in life and beyond death. Once We Were Sisters is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler. Maxine is just shy of her 40th 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.

The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach's attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team—until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears.

When Michel, a Swiss banker, discovers his wife Alice's betrayal he turns for help to a Russian client who leads him into unknown territory, endangering not only his own life but that of Alice, and above all, his 14-year-old daughter, Pamela. Their charmed life - a beautiful house on the French Riviera, elegant vacations, and boarding school in Switzerland for Pamela - is not all that it seems. As the repercussions of Michel's illicit deals move closer in around them, Alice finds herself in Amagansett with her artist sister who is having a crisis of her own.