"A wholly entrancing narrative….Kohler has a fine ear for truth and untruth and the musical possibilities of their interplay."—J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace At a hotel in Switzerland, a mysterious and elegant woman is recovering from an unspecified illness. One day, a man approaches her on the terrace. "You were a friend of Daisy Summers," he says. With that simple statement begins the unraveling of a decades-old mystery and a journey into a mind as fascinatingly intelligent and amoral as readers have seen since Patricia Highsmith unleashed The Talented Mr. Ripley. Other Press is proud to reissue Sheila Kohler's stunning debut novel. In the fifteen years since first publication of The Perfect Place, Kohler has staked her own terrain in a series of unique and seductive novels and short stories that have been internationally acclaimed.
Author
Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the younger of two girls. Upon matriculation at 17 from Saint Andrews, with a distinction in history (1958), she left the country for Europe. She lived for 15 years in Paris, where she married, did her undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne, and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three girls, she moved to the USA in 1981, and did an MFA in writing at Columbia. In the summer of 1987, her first published story, “The Mountain,” came out in “The Quarterly” and received an O’Henry prize and was published in the O’Henry Prize Stories of 1988. It also became the first chapter in her first novel, "The Perfect Place," which was published by Knopf the next year.
