A teen girl dominates her dysfunctional family and escapes her home life through cinema visits and a sexual awakening in this psychological novel.
In 1920s South Africa, Bill is the wild child of her family. Coddled by her mother, feared by her sisters, she does as she pleases. Skipping school to see the same movie time and again, enticing lonely men with her budding sexuality, Bill fulfills her reckless, selfish fantasies while her family disintegrates around her.
A recluse afflicted with chronic pain and spiraling melancholy, Bill's mother spends most of her time bedridden under the medicinal care of doctors. Her father's once-successful diamond business has fallen on hard times. Her sisters struggle with their own adolescent problems, even as Bill embraces her own.
Then an impulsive act to supposedly ease her mother's suffering threatens everything Bill's family has left...
"Violence takes the stunning, explicit form of psychosexual bondage... Lush and opaquely eerie." - The New York Times Book Review

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Upon matriculation at seventeen, she left for Europe. Kohler lived for fifteen years in Paris, where she got married and completed an undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three children, she moved to the United States in 1981 and earned an MFA in writing at Columbia.

Kohler has taught at The Writer's Voice, SUNY Purchase, Sarah Lawrence, Colgate, CCNY, Bennington, Columbia, and Princeton.