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Literature & Fiction

HARRISON, KATHRYN

Contemporary

Harper-perennial

In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, The Binding Chair intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future.

The Binding Chair: or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Now available from Random House Trade Paperbacks—the extraordinary first novel by the bestselling author of The KissThis first novel from Kathryn Harrison is a story of obsession, lust, and despair, detailing the life of the narrator, Isabel, and her troubled family. Readers witness a daughter’s passionate struggle to free herself from her mother’s tyranny.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Thicker Than Water

Perennial

The spread of devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux is one of the impressive religious manifestations of our time. During her few years on earth this young French Carmelite was scarcely to be distinguished from many another devoted nun, but her death brought an almost immediate awareness of her unique gifts. Through her letters, and especially through the publication of "The Little Flower" she soon came to mean a great deal to numberless people. Within twenty-eight years after death, this simple young nun had been canonized; and in 1944, the pope declared her the secondary patroness of France. Born to a devout Catholic bourgeois family, Therese and her four surviving sisters all became nuns. Therese had long assumed she would die young and looked forward to it as her reunion with God and her lost loved ones. When her health began to fail in 1894 (she was 20 years old and the tuberculosis that was diagnosed would end her life aged 24) she suffered her first pulmonary haemorrage on a Good Friday and rejoiced in the fact that God had announced her imminent death to her on the anniversary of his own crucifixion. Her sainthood and the continuing attraction of her life and belief stems from self-sacrifice.

Saint Therese of Lisieux

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003

From one of the most admired literary voices of our time, a magical, riveting story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia's last Tsar. St. Petersburg, 1917: as the New Year dawns, a diver pulls the murdered body of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, from the icy waters of the Neva River. Hours later, his daughters are taken to the Tsar's palace, where the Tsarina makes a shocking request: would Masha, 18, take on her father's role as healer at the sickbed of the Tsarevitch Alyosha? Shaken, Masha agrees to do what she can for the young prince, haunted as she is by questions about her father's powers and her future in a country accelerating toward political apocalypse. Two months later, the Bolshevik Revolution forces the Tsar to abdicate, and the whole royal family is placed under arrest in the Alexander Palace. Trapped together in increasingly harsh living conditions, Masha and Alyosha find themselves taking increasing solace in one another's company. The two teenagers, with radically differe

Enchantments (Lib)(CD)

Literary

BOOKS ON TAPE]

Early on an April morning, eighteen-year-old Billy Frank Gilley, Jr., killed his sleeping parents. Surprised in the act by his younger sister, Becky, he turned on her as well. Billy then climbed the stairs to the bedroom of his other sister, Jody, and said, “We’re free.” But is one ever free after an unredeemable act of violence? In this mesmerizing book–based on interviews with Billy and Jody as well as with friends, police, and social workers involved in the case–bestselling writer Kathryn Harrison brilliantly uncovers the true story behind this shocking crime and examines the extent as well as the limits of psychic resilience in the aftermath of tragedy.

While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family

Historical

Ballantine Books

In this exquisite book of personal reflections on a woman’s life as child, wife, and mother, Kathryn Harrison, “a writer of extraordinary gifts” (Tobias Wolff), re-creates episodes in her life, exploring how experiences of childhood recur in memory, to be transformed and sometimes healed in the lives we lead as adults. At the heart of Seeking Rapture is the notion that a woman’s life is a continuous process of transformation, an ongoing overcoming and re-creating of self. Standing in her children’s bedroom, Harrison asks, “How did it happen that I got from there to here?” The bestselling author of The Kiss and The Seal Wife writes with honesty and grace of how her early longing for the mother who abandoned her led to a pattern of self-destructive behavior, from shoplifting to bulimia, and to yearning for ways to transcend and even erase her physical self, to become the perfect child her mother could love. As a woman, she writes of time, the relentless passage experienced by adults, in contrast to the languors of childhood, and she recalls with vividness and humor her grandmother’s attempts in her eighties to cheat on a driving test. And as a daughter, she writes of caring for her ailing mother, hoping for closure that does not come, but which she creates on her own terms. “This is a writer at the top of her form, entirely the master of her material,” said Mary Gordon about The Kiss, and the same can be said about Seeking Rapture, a book that is by turns startling, moving, insightful, and always resonant and true.

Seeking Rapture: Scenes from a Woman's Life

Random House]

Stunning, hypnotic, spare, The Seal Wife is the masterly new novel by Kathryn Harrison, “a writer of extraordinary gifts” (Tobias Wolff). Set in Alaska in 1915, it tells the story of a young scientist’s consuming love for a woman known as the Aleut, a woman who never speaks, who refuses to reveal so much as her name. Born and educated in midwestern cities, Bigelow is sent north by the United States government to establish a weather observatory in Anchorage. But what could have prepared him for the loneliness of a railroad town with more than two thousand men and only a handful of women, or for winter nights twenty hours long? And what can protect him from obsession—obsession with a woman who seems in her silence and mystery to possess the power to destroy his life forever, and obsession with the weather kite he invents, a kite he hopes will fly higher than any has ever flown before and will penetrate the secrets of the heavens? A novel of passions both dangerous and generative, The Seal Wife explores the nature of desire and its ability to propel an individual beyond himself and convention. As she brilliantly reimagines the terrain of the Alaskan frontier during the period of the First World War, Harrison, a “master of her material” (Mary Gordon), also evokes early efforts to chart the weather and reveals the interior realm of the psyche and emotions—a human landscape that, in its splendor and terror, is profoundly and eerily reminiscent of the frozen frontier and the storms that scour its face.

The Seal Wife: A Novel

United States

Poison

Francisca de Luarac, the daughter of a poor Spanish silk grower, is a dreamer of fabulous dreams. Marie Louise de Bourbon, the niece of Louis XIV, dances in slippers of fine Spanish silk in the French Court of the Sun King and imagines her own enchanted future. Born on the same day--in an age when superstition, repression, and the Inquisition reign--the lives of these two young women unfold in tandem, barely touching. Each hoards the memory of her adored lost mother like an amulet. Francica's obsession with her lover, a Catholick priest, will shaper her fate. Marie Loouise is yoked by political expediency to the mad, imptoent Carlos II of Spain. But even as their twin destinies spiral inexorably toward disaster, both Queen and commoner cultivate a dangerous, secret life dedicated to resistance, transcendence, and love. Written in gorgeous prose that has the sheen of silk, Kathryn Harrison's POISON vividlyreminds us of the persistence of desire, the passion that exists between mothers and daughters, and the sorcery of dreams.

We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us.
A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people.
With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen.
I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.

The Kiss

Parenting & Relationships

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Books by HARRISON, KATHRYN