The Seal Wife
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
From the author of the bestselling THE BINDING CHAIR comes an extraordinary tale of desire set in the snowfields of 1917 Alaska.
Bigelow is a scientist, meticulous and obsessive, a man of tightly coiled passion. Stationed in the tiny frontier town of Anchorage, Alaska in 1915, he builds a weather observatory, a kite big enough to penetrate the heavens, carrying instruments to track the great storms that scour the land. He is distracted from his labours when he meets a native Aleut woman, a stitcher of furs, whose muteness calls up in him an almost unbearable longing. Her ferocious self-containment begins to seem to him more and more animal – and yet the more her silence pushes him away he burns to possess her. And when she disappears, he begins to believe he'll die if he never sees her again…
An incendiary tale set against the sear and haunting landscape of the Great North, THE SEAL WIFE merges the enchantment of myth with a taut and chilling story of erotic compulsion.
Reviews
Praise for THE BINDING CHAIR:
‘A spellbinding novel, ruthless, moving and utterly without sentiment.' Mail on Sunday
'The Binding Chair is a disturbing, beautifully plotted novel, intricate in its detail and panoramic in its sweep. It presents us with a world in which tragedy is natural and everyday, where beauty is a reminder of cruelty.' Daily Telegraph
'Harrison's mesmeric voice compels the reader towards the inevitable climax. The Binding Chair is a beautiful account of the lives of two very different women and the difficulties they face in their quest for independence.' Observer
'A vivid family saga. The characters come alive on the page. Harrison has convincingly captured the Shanghai of the early twentieth-century, a jarring, cacophonous, swarming city of possibility.' Evening Standard
Praise for A THOUSAND ORANGE TREES:
'A magical novel' Lisa Tuttle, Time Out
'Audacious feats of the imagination. This rich and complex novel is both harrowing and compelling.' Nicola Humble, TLS
'A rich deep well of stories as fantastic as dreams.' Anne Chisholm, Observer
'Seductive, earthy, shocking and emotional.' Woman's Journal
About the author
Kathryn Harrison is a graduate of Stanford University and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel, Thicker than Water, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second, Exposure. Her most recent novel is A Thousand Orange Trees. She is also the author of The Kiss which received critical acclaim, and Seeking Rapture. She lives in New York City with her husband, the writer Colin Harrison and their children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Obsessions are Harrison's forte (The Binding Chair, etc.) and here she plumbs the mind of a young man deprived of companions, diversions and even the basic amenities of civilization who develops a passion for a woman whose very remoteness feeds his desire. In 1915, 26-year-old Bigelow Greene is sent to establish a U.S. weather station in Anchorage, a primitive settlement where the sled dogs howl all night in the 20-hour-long winter darkness. Bigelow is asingle-minded man; he first becomes obsessed with the idea of building a huge kite to measure air temperature high in the atmosphere and thus enable long-range forecasting. But he's soon smitten with a woman the locals call the Aleut. She's mysterious, enigmatic, virtually mute sex between she and Bigelow is wordless and when he discovers that she's left Anchorage, Bigelow almost goes mad with longing. Eventually, he succumbs to the lure of another woman, Miriam Getz, the daughter of the storekeeper. She, too, is mute by choice, and she proves to be a demon, the very opposite of the self-contained Aleut. Bigelow is caught in her trap. As Harrison describes the black loneliness of winter and the mosquito-infested summer days, the mood grows darker and more suspenseful, emblematic of Bigelow's desolate psyche. In perfect control of the spare narrative, Harrison writes mesmerizing, cinematically vivid scenes: Native American laborers fascinated by Caruso recordings; the gigantic kite nearly dragging Bigelow to his death off a cliff and, later, soaring into the turbulent sky of a rousing storm. Given these ominous events, and for those who know the Celtic legend of the seal wife, the ending is all the more surprising. Author tour.
