Sheila Kohler has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Once We Were Sisters.
Once We Were Sisters
Summary
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 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. 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.
©2017 Sheila Kohler (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Once We Were Sisters
Summary
A powerful and heartbreaking portrait of the bond between two sisters, in life and beyond death. Once We Were Sisters is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler. Growing up in the suffocating gentility of 1950s South Africa, the girls plan grand lives for themselves that will bring them out of the long shadow cast by their father's death and their overbearing mother's bullying. 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. More haunting, however, are the questions. How had she failed to protect her sister? Was Maxine's murder a matter of accident or destiny? What lies in the soil of their troubled motherland that condemns its women to such violence? Powerful, moving and tragic, Once We Were Sisters is an act of love and an extraordinary account of an unspeakable loss.
©2017 Sheila Kohler (P)2017 Blackstone Audio