The Perfect Place

By Sheila Kohler

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394573730
• ISBN13: 9780394573731
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 147 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Perfect Place by Shelia Kohler (Hardcover)

This gripping and disturbing book is quite simply a study in perversity - not to be missed, and truly unforgettable! Description from the book dust jacket: Imagine that you are listening to someone tell you everything. Imagine that this person, a woman of a certain station - wellborn, monied, traveled, wearied with her labors to discover the aptest habitation for her troublesome health - may have killed someone, may have murdered someone, a schoolmate, long ago. Imagine that this woman is the kind of woman who would attach no particular importance to the business of killing someone. Imagine that she is the kind of woman who would attach no particular importance to whatever her commerce might have been with the life and death of another person. Imagine that the woman you are listening to would attach immensely more importance to the character of the light that reveals you to her than she would to the fact that it is a human being - you! - whom the light reveals to her. Imagine a person like this and you will have imagined the chillingly familiar central figure in Sheila Kohler's uniquely disturbing literary debut, a psychosexual striptease that accomplishes its exquisitely macabre theater sentence by icy sentence.