ONCE WE WERE SISTERS by Sheila Kohler

(Canongate £8.99) THE novelist Sheila Kohler and her elder sister, Maxine, grew up in South Africa in an atmosphere of material privilege, but emotional turmoil.

Their mother liked to drink and sometimes the sisters feared that ‘a witch has come and taken Mother’s place’. Both girls married young. Maxine was ‘smitten at first sight’ by Karl, a brilliant young heart surgeon. Before the wedding, one of his former girl- friends pleaded with her not to marry him but refused to say why. At 20, Sheila, already pregnant, married Michael, also 20.

Both marriages were to prove unhappy. While Michael was unfaithful, Maxine’s fate was far worse. Karl beat her, ordering their black servants to hold her down as she struggled, and on a spring evening he crashed their car, killing Maxine.

She was 39 and the mother of six children. In her first work of nonfiction, Kohler elegantly summons the tragic shades of the past.