The Seal Wife [Paperback]

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

On Harrison’s first memoir, THE KISS:

'One of the most startling books you are ever likely to read.' Gill Hornby, Observer

'I couldn't stop reading this. I'll never stop remembering it.' Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club

'An unforgettable tale, a work of searing honesty, of immaculate literature.' Kate Figes, Independent on Sunday

'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

'Remarkably moving.' Penelope Mortimer, Daily Telegraph

'Heartfelt, extraordinary … This is a book that, once read, refuses to go away.' Marie Claire

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.

"Harrison writes like an angel."
'The Times'

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, and a kite big enough to penetrate the heavens and 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, the more he burns to possess her. And when she disappears, he starts to believe he'll die if he never sees her again.

An incendiary tale set against the sere and haunting landscape of the Great North, 'The Seal Wife' merges the enchantment of myth with a taut and chilling story of erotic compulsion.

On 'The Binding Chair':

"A tale as absorbing and exciting as Arthur Golden's 'Memoirs of a Geisha'."
'Sunday Express'

"A spellbinding novel, ruthless, moving and utterly without sentiment."
'Mail on Sunday'

"A disturbingly, 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'

"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'

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.

Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in. Not asks, exactly. She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.

She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isn’t on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats. But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg. She wears a dress with buttons and she cooks at a stove, and the two of them eat before, and then after as she sits cross-legged in the tub and smokes her pipe.

She smokes, and he watches her smoke. He thinks her mouth may be the most beautiful part of her – not red, not brown or mauve or pink, but a colour for which he has no name. Her top lip is finely drawn, almost stern; the bottom one is plump, with a crease in the centre. On another face its fullness might be considered a pout, but her black eyes convey none of the disappointment, nor the invitation, of such an expression.

She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long, as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.

At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window, he rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more does this make him want her!

Then, one day, it’s over: she won’t open her door to him.