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.

"One of the most startling books you are ever likely to read."
GILL HORNBY, 'Observer'

Heart breaking and extraordinary, Kathryn Harrison's beautifully written memoir bears witness to the years of her life in which the family bonds of love and loyalty are irrevocably broken by a dark, disturbing passion.

"I couldn't stop reading this. I'll never stop remembering it."
MARY KARR, author of 'The Liar's Club'

"Eerily beautiful prose, making exposure and self-viscerating confession into an art form."
NICCI GERRARD, 'Observer'

"Remarkable for its candour, but also for its elegance, its sense of morality and its generosity of spirit."
ELIZA CHARLTON, 'Sunday Telegraph'

"Harrison writes like an angel."
PENNY PERRICK, 'The Times'

'This is a tale as absorbing and exciting as Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.' Sunday Express The magical tale of a young orphan's adventures after she flees rural China for turn-of-the-century Shanghai. From Kathryn Harrison, author of the bestselling memoir THE KISS. Beautiful, charismatic and destructive, May escapes an arranged marriage in rural China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where, in 1899, she meets Arthur, an Australian. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, Arthur calls on May not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet. Reforming May is out of the question, so Arthur marries her instead, and brings her home to live with his sister Dolly, her husband Dick, and their two girls Alice and Cecily. In Alice May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for the child she has lost. And it is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve year old is caught preparing her aunt's opium pipe, Alice is enrolled in a London boarding school, far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will come to reclaim her, and to control the whole family.

"Luminous and affecting . . . [Exposure] examines the often fine line between art and abuse. . . . Taut in plot, beautifully realistic, and intelligently disturbing."
"-Harper's Bazaar"
Ann Rogers appears to be a happily married, successful young woman. A talented photographer, she creates happy memories for others, videotaping weddings, splicing together scenes of smiling faces, editing out awkward moments. But she cannot edit her own memories so easily-images of a childhood spent as her father's model and muse, the subject of his celebrated series of controversial photographs. To cope, Ann slips into a secret life of shame and vice. But when the Museum of Modern Art announces a retrospective of her father's shocking portraits, Ann finds herself teetering on the edge of self-destruction, desperately trying to escape the psychological maelstrom that threatens to consume her.
"Astounding . . . told in prose as multifaceted as a diamond, crystalline and mesmerizing. 'Remarkable' hardly goes far enough."
"-Cosmopolitan
""Impossible to put down . . . Kathryn Harrison is an extremely gifted writer, poetic, passionate, and elegant."
"-San Francisco Chronicle"
"Exquisite, exhilarating, and harrowing."
-Donna Tartt, author of "The Secret History" and "The Little Friend"
"A breathless urban nightmare not easy to forget. Stark, brilliant, and original work."
"-Kirkus Reviews "(starred review)
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A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time. As Kathryn Harrison points out in her Introduction, Hester is "the herald of the modern American heroine, a mother of such strength and stature that she towers over her progeny much as she does the citizens of Salem."

From the author of 'The Kiss' and 'The Binding Chair' comes an intense novel of dark secrets and sexual betrayal. Will has a good sex life - with the woman he married. So why then is he increasingly plagued by violent erotic fantasies? He's about to lose his grip when he attends a college reunion and there discovers evidence of a past sexual betrayal, one serious enough that it threatens to overpower the present. Hypnotic and beautifully written, this mesmerising novel explores how painful psychological truths long buried within a family can corrupt the present but, through courage and understanding, lead to healing and renewal.

Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan of Arc for our time—a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence on the battlefield, in the royal court, during a brutally rigged inquisition and imprisonment, and in the face of her death. In this new take on Joan’s story, Harrison deftly weaves historical fact, myth, folklore, scripture, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a fascinating narrative, revitalizing our sense of Joan as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

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 different experiences of Russia, of Rasputin, and of Alyosha's parents' unlucky reign, create a private realm of magic and of love, as Masha introduces the young Tsarevitch to a wild and beautiful land he will never live to rule. An unusual love story, stitched delicately into the rich tapestry of Russian history, Enchantments brings to life the final days of Rasputin and the Romanovs. It is a breathtaking tour-de-force by one of our most acclaimed writers.

In this dark gem of a book by the author of The Kiss, a complex mother-daughter relationship precipitates a journey through depression to greater understanding, acceptance, freedom, and love, .
Spare and unflinching, The Mother Knot is Kathryn Harrison's courageous exploration of her painful feelings about her mother, and of her depression and recovery. Writer, wife, mother of three, Kathryn Harrison finds herself, at age forty-one, wrestling with a black, untamable force that seems to have the power to undermine her sanity and her safety, a darkness that is tied to her relationship with her own mother, dead for many years but no less a haunting presence. Shaken by a family emergency that reveals the fragility of her current happiness, Harrison falls prey to despair and anxiety she believed she'd overcome long before. A relapse of anorexia becomes the tangible reminder of a youth spent trying to achieve the perfection she had hoped would win her mother's love, and forces her to confront, understand, and ultimately cast out--in startling physical form--the demons within herself. Powerful, insightful, unforgettable, by "a writer of extraordinary gifts" (Tobias Wolff), Kathryn Harrison's The Mother Knot""is a knockout.

"From the Hardcover edition."

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.

In this extraordinary memoir, one of the best young writers in America today transforms into a work of art the darkest passage imaginable in a young woman's life: an obsessive love affair between father and daughter that began when Kathryn Harrison, twenty years old, was reunited with a parent whose absence had haunted her youth.
Exquisitely and hypnotically written, like a bold and terrifying dream, The Kiss is breathtaking in its honesty and in the power and beauty of its creation. A story both of taboo and of family complicity in breaking taboo, The Kiss is also about love -- about the most primal of love triangles, the one that ensnares a child between mother and father.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of "A Million Little Pieces," the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers' claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, "How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, 'This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?"
The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.
Contributors: John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray Gonzalez, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer

For the first time in paperback, here is the bestselling novel by “a writer of extraordinary gifts” (Tobias Wolff). Stunning, hypnotic, spare, The Seal Wife tells the story of a young scientist and his consuming love for a woman known only as the Aleut, a woman who refuses to speak.

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 outside convention. Kathryn Harrison brilliantly re-creates the Alaskan frontier during the period of the First World War as she explores with deep understanding the interior landscape of the human psyche—a landscape eerily continuous with the splendor and terror of the frozen frontier and the storms that blow over the earth and its face.

Passing the Buck is the first in-depth study of the impact of federalism on Canadian environmental policy. The book takes a detailed look at the ongoing debate on the subject and traces the evolution of the role of the federal government in environmental policy and federal-provincial relations concerning the environment from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The author challenges the widespread assumption that federal and provincial governments invariably compete to extend their jurisdiction. Using well-researched case studies and extensive research to support her argument, the author points out that the combination of limited public attention to the environment and strong opposition from potentially regulated interests yields significant political costs and limited political benefits. As a result, for the most part, the federal government has been content to leave environmental protection to the provinces. In effect, the federal system has allowed the federal government to pass the buck to the provinces and shirk the political challenge of environmental protection.