A powerful memoir from an acclaimed novelist reveals a past of privilege, violence and possibly murder . . . This many-layered memoir, rich in texture and suggestion, executed with a novelist's eye for oblique human suffering, is her devastating reckoning with the past * * Guardian * * An extraordinary memoir of loss . . . tender and powerful * * Observer * * A powerful memoir of love, loss and the author's failure to protect her beloved sister . . . the result is wonderful - spare, controlled and immensely resonant . . . a compact little gem * * Sunday Times * * Engrossing and beautifully written * * Sunday Express * * An elegant book, and a story that packs a mighty punch . . . A powerful meditation not only on loss and grief but also on complicity within a family and a country . . . Both horrifying and illuminating, and which lingers in the reader's consciousness long after the final page has been turned -- Gillian Slovo * * Times Literary Supplement * * This is a memoir of love, sorrow, sisterhood and privilege. It's also a memoir of the limitations of such privilege - in particular, the inescapable tragedy of being born female in a patriarchal world, where all the money, beauty and breeding cannot protect you from a man who takes what he wants without consequence * * New York Times * * A rich and poignant memoir -- J M COETZEE A pleasurable book, both because of its sinuous prose and because of its setting . . . the present tense has a poetic power, turning many of the scenes into visual set pieces * * Telegraph * * Beautiful and disturbing . . . It is a tragic tale, with echoes of cultural sexism and misogyny, yet a triumphant story of a young woman's liberation from this culture and her emergence as a writer -- JOYCE CAROL OATES Kohler digs into her past for a searing and intimate memoir about love turned deadly . . . Her powerful story gives a sharp contrast between a sister's lasting love and the ways society protects a violent man * * BBC, Ten Books to Read in 2017 * *