The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
A Novel
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
It's rural Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, when Europe burns with a passion for long, flowing locks. So when seven sisters, born into fatherless poverty, grow up with hair cascading down their backs, to their ankles, and beyond, men are not slow to recognize their potential.
Soon, they're a singing and dancing septet: Irish jigs kicked out in dusty church halls. But it is not their singing or their dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. In an Ireland still hungry and melancholy with the Great Famine, the Swiney hair is a rich offering. And their hair will take dark-hearted Darcy, bickering twins Berenice and Enda, plain Pertilly, gentle Oona, wild Ida, and fearful, flame-haired Manticory-the writer of their on- and off-stage adventures-out of poverty, through the dance halls of Ireland, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It will bring them suitors and obsessive admirers, it will bring some of them love and each of them loss. For their past trails behind the sisters like the tresses on their heads and their fame and fortune will come at a terrible price.
Rich in period detail, peopled by a bewitching cast of characters, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is a tale of exploitation and celebrity, illegitimacy and sibling rivalry, love triangles and financial skullduggery, of death and devilry. And a very great deal of hair.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lovric's inventive fifth novel (after The Book of Human Skin) follows seven Irish sisters on a journey sparked by an improbable nationwide fascination with their hair. The fatherless Swiney girls live in famine-struck County Kildare in 1865. Desperate, they take to the stage under the name "The Swiney Godivas," ending each performance by letting down their ankle-length tresses. Soon a doll maker senses the potential for profit in their "follicular attractions." He persuades them to move to Dublin, where they become the latest sensation and adjust to affluence. Their namesake dolls and Swiney Godiva hair products rake in cash, but happiness proves more elusive. Darcy, the harsh and greedy eldest sister, keeps the others short of both pocket money and freedom. Heartbreak, deception, a muckraking journalist, and the public's fickle taste all sabotage their success. Momentum falters midway though due to an overabundance of exposition, while a section set in Venice never quite convinces despite its precision of detail. Still, the book's rollicking, earthy voice evokes 19th-century Ireland with gusto, and Lovric brings the sisters and their tangled relationships to life as they come full circle to confront the poverty and losses from their past.