Kathryn Harrison Bücher

Als May 5 Jahre alt ist, werden ihr die Füsse gebunden, um dem Schönheitsideal der äLotosfüsseä zu entsprechen. Mit 15 wird sie an einen reichen, aber brutalen Seidenhändler verheiratet, dem sie schliesslich entfliehen kann. Sie landet in einem Bordell in Shanghai.

Er liebt die Stille. Er liebt das Wetter. Er will beweisen, dass die Luft hoch über Alaska wärmer ist als über Nairobi. Bigelow ist Wetterforscher - doch seine wahre Leidenschaft gehört einer schweigsamen Aleutin. Es ist eine seltsame Liebe voller Rätsel, deren Tiefe Bigelow erst erkennt, als die stumme Frau eines Tages aus seinem Leben zu verschwinden droht.

Eigentlich führt der Psychoanalytiker Will Moreland eine glückliche Ehe. Doch seit ihr gemeinsamer Sohn vor drei Jahren tödlich verunglückte, hat seine Frau sich emotional und sexuell von ihm zurückgezogen, und seine erotischen Fantasien gewinnen immer mehr Macht über ihn. Als Will bei einem College- Jahrgangstreffen eine ehemalige Freundin trifft, überkommt ihn der Gedanke, der Vater ihrer Tochter zu sein. Und dann taucht eine faszinierende junge Frau in seiner Praxis auf. Ein eleganter und psychologisch raffinierter Spannungsroman.

In Shanghai 1878 wird der kleinen May brutal die Füße gebrochen, um ihren Heiratswert zu steigern. Doch sie kämpft um ihre Eigenständigkeit und muss schließlich ihren Körper verkaufen, was sie auf eine Reise vom Shanghai des 19. Jahrhunderts über London bis zur Riviera der 1920er Jahre führt.

Exploring the complexities of familial relationships, the narrative delves into the dynamics of love, conflict, and reconciliation within a family. Characters grapple with their pasts while navigating the challenges of their present, revealing secrets that test their bonds. Themes of identity, belonging, and the impact of shared history are central, offering a poignant reflection on what it means to be part of a family. The story unfolds with emotional depth, inviting readers to contemplate their own connections and the frames that define them.

In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes and Running in the Family, a memoir of the author's upbringing by her grandparents in a fading mansion above Sunset Boulevard -- a childhood at once privileged and unusual, filled with the mementos and echoes of their impossibly exotic and peripatetic lives.Kathryn Harrison always understood that her family was beyond eccentric -- they'd breached the bounds of the unconventional. She was largely raised by her grandparents in an outsized Tudor confection of a house on the periphery of Bel Air, which she thought of as "Sunset," her kingdom of the imagination, inhabited by the past and its numberless artifacts. True wandering Jews, her grandparents had arrived in Los Angeles in the forties after dramatic, globetrotting lives. Harry Jacobs had been a fur trapper in Alaska, a soldier in the trenches of the Great War, a traveling salesman in a Model T. Margaret Sassoon had lived a privileged life as a member of a Jewish merchant family in Shanghai, turning down offers of marriage from Russian princes exiled by the Revolution. Kathryn Harrison grew up in an almost mythical realm of their letters and artifacts and stories -- until declining finances forced to sell the house on Sunset in 1971, and night fell fast. On Sunset seeks to recover that childhood, that place, those lives -- and does so with piercing poignancy.

One of today's best young American writers transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter.

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.