Sheila Kohler, Author . Ontario Review $22.95 (150p) ISBN 978-0-86538-110-0
Though South Africa–born Kohler (Cracks
; Children of Pithiviers
; etc.) sets her stories in France, Italy, South Africa and the U.S., these 12 spare tales evoke not place but time—often a single, terrible moment. The 11-year-old...
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Sheila Kohler, Author . Ontario Review $23.95 (200p) ISBN 978-0-86538-112-4
Kohler (Cracks
) explores the dark secrets of a South African family in her elegantly written but lugubrious fifth novel. Translator Kate Kempden, these days a Parisian ex-pat, returns to Crossways, her stately childhood home in Johannesburg,...
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Sheila Kohler, Author . Other Press $24.95 (425p) ISBN 978-1-59051-262-3
The life of Lucy Dillon, an aristocrat in Marie Antoinette's court, is the subject of the seventh novel and flawed first foray into historical realism for South African author Kohler (Crossways
). Through her resilience and resourcefulness, Lucy
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Sheila Kohler, Author . Penguin $15 (234p) ISBN 978-0-14-311597-7
South African Kohler's well-written seventh novel takes the lives of the Brontës: Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and their father, and substitutes imagination for facts. The book opens in 1846 with Charlotte's father recovering from
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Sheila Kohler, Author Helicon Nine Editions $12.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-884235-29-0
This collection is a novel only in the most metaphorical sense, but that suits a book in which so much is accomplished by implication and suggestion. As in her other work (The House on R Street, etc.), Kohler adopts a lyrical, often elegiac tone...
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Sheila Kohler, Author Zoland Books $21 (204p) ISBN 978-1-58195-032-8
Following her acclaimed 1999 novel, Cracks, Sheila Kohler returns with the spellbinding Children of Pithiviers, once again mining themes of childhood and lost innocence. The specter of Nazism hangs over a small French village where Jewish...
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Sheila Kohler, Author Alfred A. Knopf $20 (143p) ISBN 978-0-679-42606-6
Characterized by a mechanical pace and monochrome emotion, Kohler's second novel (after The Perfect Place ) establishes a potentially poisonous mood but fails to takes it anywhere. The protagonist, a teenaged girl in 1920s South Africa who goes by...
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Sheila Kohler, Author Zoland Books $21 (165p) ISBN 978-1-58195-008-3
A group of South African women who were all members of a boarding-school swimming team revisit a shared and haunted past in Kohler's polished, compact and chilling third novel. Summoned by their old headmistress after developers threaten the school's
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Sheila Kohler. Penguin, $15 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-14-311919-7
A widowed South African woman of 48 confronts the betrayals of her past in Kohler's graceful new novel (after Becoming Jane Eyre). "Bill" (whose tomboy youth earned her that nickname) lives comfortably with the fortune her husband Mark left her in...
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Sheila Kohler. Penguin, $15 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-14-312101-5
Set primarily in Paris in 1978, Kohler's newest (after Children of Pithiviers) is the tale of Dawit, a beautiful, young but broke Ethiopian refugee, and M., a 60-year-old novelist who writes obsessively about her girlhood in a French African colony...
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Sheila Kohler. Penguin, $16 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-14-312519-8
It was “a struggle for power,” says the patient of her psychoanalysis in this short novel based on Sigmund Freud’s famous “Dora” case. In her latest, Kohler (Becoming Jane Eyre) alternates between Dora and Freud’s perspectives while chronicling...
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Shelia Kohler, Author, Sheila Kohler, Author Alfred A. Knopf $18.95 (175p) ISBN 978-0-394-57374-8
This curious collection by the author of The Perfect Place offers 12 imaginative stories, set mainly in Europe, whose intriguing openings are as promising as their inconclusive endings are disappointing. Typically, Kohler's carefully constructed...
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Shelia Kohler, Author, Sheila Kohler, Author, Gordon Lish, Editor Knopf Publishing Group $15.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-394-57373-1
In this relentlessly literary first novel, writing techniques dominate content. Prose in the once avant-garde style of Robbe-Grillet and Duras (theirs stemming from passion, Kohler's a passionless intellectual exercise) evokes the terminal ennui of...
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Sheila Kohler. Penguin, $16 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-313518-0
Family drama and organized crime collide in this gripping, often touching thriller from Kohler (Cracks). When Swiss banker Michel discovers that his wife, Alice, has been unfaithful, he turns for consolation to one of his charming but shifty clients,
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