Sheila Kohler Bücher

Eine junge Frau wird plötzlich gezwungen, sich mit einem verdrängten Geheimnis aus ihrer Vergangenheit auseinanderzusetzen.

This is the story of Maxine and Sheila Kohler, two sisters who grew up in the suffocating gentility of 1950s South Africa. When Maxine is just shy of her fortieth birthday her husband, a brilliant and respected surgeon, drives their car off the road and kills her. Devastated, Sheila returns to the country of her birth, haunted by questions. How had she failed to protect her sister? Was Maxine's death a matter of chance, or destiny? What lies in the soil of their troubled motherland that condemns its women to such violence?

Set in a South African boarding school in the early 1960s, this eerie and elliptical tale unfolds within the elite girls swim team, where the arrival of Italian student Fiamma Coronna disrupts the status quo. Beautiful and athletic, Fiamma quickly becomes the center of attention, inciting envy among her teammates. However, her sudden disappearance into the surrounding grasslands during the summer creates a haunting mystery that lingers for decades. Forty years later, the former teammates gather for a reunion, and the buried memories of that fateful summer resurface, revealing a shocking truth that can no longer be contained. The narrative is rich with psychological suspense, drawing comparisons to classics like *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie* and *Picnic at Hanging Rock*, yet it maintains a unique, chilling power. The exploration of adolescent passion and tribalism exposes the underlying violence that can exist even in innocence, evoking the wildness of the veld and the complexities of youth. Critics praise the novel for its polished and compact storytelling, highlighting its disturbing yet captivating dissection of evil. Recognized as a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal and Newsday, it has also been adapted into a major motion picture starring Eva Green.

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.