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 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. Kohler evokes the bond between sisters and shows how that bond changes but never breaks, even after death. “A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates

An “eerie, elliptical masterpiece set in a South African boarding school in the early 1960s. . . . First-rate psychological suspense . . . played out flawlessly” (Kirkus Reviews). 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. Forty years later, the former teammates return to the school for a reunion, and the memory of that summer emerges like a long buried secret, the shocking, violent truth of what really happened to Fiamma no longer able to be contained . . . “Riveting . . . while evocative of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, Kohler’s writing is so smoothly confident and erotic that she has produced a tale resonant with a chilling power all its own.” —Elle “A stunning and singular tale of the passion and tribalism of adolescence, Cracks lays bare the violence that lurks in the heart of even the most innocent. Shocking, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies . . . conjures up the wildness of the veld and the passion and drama of adolescence . . . peculiarly satisfying.” —The Times Literary Supplement “A disturbing, note-perfect novel. Dissection of evil has rarely been so extravagantly executed.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Polished, compact and chilling . . . Powerful.” —Publishers Weekly A Library Journal and Newsday Best Book of the Year, now a major motion picture starring Eva Green

The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate. Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent. So unfolds the story of the Brontë sisters. At its centre are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.

Stories about women by a South African writer. The story, Cracks, the basis for a novel by the same name, is on a boarding school for girls, while in Luck a beautiful girl serves as bait for her mother to get a man.

An award-winning author reimagines one of Freud’s most famous and controversial cases. Sheila Kohler's memoir Once We Were Sisters is now available. Acclaimed for her spare prose and exceptional psychological insights in her novels Becoming Jane Eyre and Love Child, Sheila Kohler’s latest is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Dreaming for Freud paints a provocative and sensual portrait of one of history’s most famous patients. In the fall of 1900, Dora’s father forces her to begin treatment with the doctor. Visiting him daily, the seventeen-year-old girl lies on his ottoman and tells him frankly about her strange life, and above all about her father's desires as far as she is concerned. But Dora abruptly ends her treatment after only eleven weeks, just as Freud was convinced he was on the cusp of a major discovery. In Dreaming for Freud, Kohler explores what might have happened between the man who changed the face of psychotherapy and the beautiful young woman who gave him her dreams.

The lies between a husband and wife are revealed, unraveling their family in this thrilling novel that moves between the French Riviera, Switzerland, and Amagansett 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 fourteen-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, while the danger circles around Pamela. Open Secrets is a suspenseful novel about relationships, family, love and the inescapable consequences of one's own actions.