Once We Were Sisters

Sheila Kohler’s memoir Once We Were Sisters (Penguin) recounts the lives of Kohler and her sister, who died at 39 after her husband drove them off a deserted road in Johannesburg. When she gets the news, Kohler flies back to the country of her birth and begins to grapple with the unusual childhood she and her sister shared, and its consequences for their lives afterward. In a memoir Joyce Carol Oates called “beautiful and disturbing,” Kohler shows that the bond between sisters changes but never breaks, even after death. Kohler, a creative writing lecturer at Princeton, is the author of 10 novels and three short-story collections.