Love Child: A Novel [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Sheila Kohler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2011

An enthralling new novel from the highly acclaimed author of Becoming Jane Eyre

The compelling story of a forbidden marriage, a baby lost, and a love triangle gone horribly wrong, Love Child centers on Bill, a South African woman whose life has been defined by the apartheid-era, class-riven society in which she lives. Under pressure to make her will, Bill is forced to think about the momentous events and decisions that have made her an extremely wealthy if somewhat disillusioned woman. To whom should she leave her fortune? As Bill relives her past, we learn that this is a simple question with a complicated answer. In elegant, sensual, and nuanced prose, Kohler skillfully explores the space between our dreams and our reality, between our hopes and our disappointments.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She currently teaches at Bennington College and Princeton University and lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 1 edition (June 28, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143119192
• ASIN: B0064XBS3A
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,080,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars un-put-downable, surprises around every corner, but profound, eye-opening, serious literature, August 7, 2011

By 

simon l - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Love Child: A Novel (Paperback)

Like most of Sheila Kohler's constantly expanding oeuvre, but perhaps more than any of the others, this new novel keeps delivering startling but credible surprises. The flashback-flashforward format seems natural almost from the beginning, and seemed to me the exact right frame for one of the novel's messages -- that life's "progress" can be driven by abrupt zigs, zags, reversals, triumphs, and unpredictable outcomes both good and bad, and when they occur there is no way to know whether they will turn out to be positive or how long they wll last. The disparate characters -- comprising (it seemed to me) something of a sociological tour of South African society in the early and middle twentieth century (not altogether different, one imagines, perhaps from other western societies, American in particular -- are compelling, interesting, all given to self-damaging, and often other people-damaging, behavior patterns and decisions, but they are not cardboard or one-dimensional. One of the aspects that affected me was how realsitically insuperable constraints , people's necessarily limited grasp of where things stand or, especially, where they could be going, generates life choices and decisions which may seem tragically askew in hindsight but are quite understandable given the scene when they were made. A really great read and a really fine novel.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical, suspenseful and psychologically complex, July 17, 2011

By 

Amy Tan (San Francisco CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love Child: A Novel (Paperback)

What a stunning book! I was up late reading it. Sheila Kohler writes stories with Gothic lyricism and sets them in lush places and historical eras of South Africa. She's a master of suspense, creating the tension of something sinister crackling underneath the facade of orderliness. She's sly in subtly revealing the abuse of power, racism, and class as the backdrop of one character's personal story and the secret that has the potential to bequeath generations of family fissures. I have been a longtime fan of her work. J M Coetzee (Nobel Laureate in Literature, DISGRACE, etc) has given consistent praise to Kohler's work. I hope that with this book new devoted fans will discover why so many fellow writers admire her work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intermittencies of the Heart, September 2, 2011

By 

Antoinette Bertha (Bronx, New York United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love Child: A Novel (Paperback)

Sheila Kohler's "Love Child" fascinates with its spare, breathless prose, exploring, as her fine novels all do, the mysteries of the human heart. The evocation of a certain privileged, yet constrained milieu in South Africa over the first half of the 20th century is nuanced with period detail, and the alternation of time sequences between present and past is deftly handled. But it is mainly the characters who elude us and haunt the reader after the story is over. What really happened, what they really feel or felt, remains tantalizingly suggested by silences and disappearances. The protagonist's harrowing confinement is vividly and painfully imagined. This gives substance to an enigmatic character whom we come to sympathize with in all her complexity. And although one mystery is resolved by novel's end, there are no easy conclusions to be drawn in Kohler's complicated world of human relations.