Kathryn Davis – författare

A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature

The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there―paths on which they still seem to be traveling.

The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’ sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.

Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls―a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other―but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls.

In Duplex, Kathryn Davis, whom the Chicago Tribune has called “one of the most inventive novelists at work today,” has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex―that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time―there’s no telling where you might come out.

Kathryn Davis’s riveting debut about the indelible pacts and hidden hatreds of sisterhood

Labrador is the story of two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the eldest, is willful, beautiful, and wayward; to Kitty, the youngest, she is the radiant center around which everything revolves. Kitty, too, is willful, but in the brooding manner of the inveterate loner. She is the one who is visited by an angel, Rogni, who reshapes her beliefs by telling her eerie, enigmatic fables that defy time and place, parables about bears, martyrs, and imprisoned daughters that seem to contain warnings about betrayals and violence to come. In the pared-down landscape of the far north, where the girls’ grandfather has his home, Kitty escapes the orbit of her sister and begins to come to terms with the demons—and the enchantments—that have been her birthright from the start.

Kathryn Davis conjures a bewitching tale of the rifts and reparation that occur between two girls who are nothing alike but have only each other to turn to, all the while destabilizing our assumptions about what a coming-of-age story is supposed to be. In Labrador one can find the origins of Davis’s hallmark lyricism and startling narrative swerves, her layered atmospherics, her fierce intelligence and wit, and above all the wild and transformative qualities of her imagination.

It is the turn of this century. Two couples—businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow, and Snow’s wife, Ruth Farr—have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole’s daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents’ house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr’s journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who’s taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.

By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.

A fictionalized account of the life of Marie Antoinette follows her through such challenges as her early marriage to the future King Louis XVI, struggles with the expectations of her station, painful palace betrayals and politics, and interactions with such figures as Mirabeau, Du Barry, and Robespierre.

Hell—part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story—is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a nineteenth-century expert on domestic management.

While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance, as if it might be possible to forestall disaster. Meanwhile, Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of the great culinary artist and chef to Napoleon, Antonin Carême.

This remarkable novel immerses us in the lives of two women in a small upstate New York town: Frances Thorn, who waits tables, despite her privileged background, and raises her twin daughters without even a memory of their father; and Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer. At the heart of the two women’s friendship is a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a prideful girl (the subject of Helle’s final opera) who is damned for using a precarious loaf of bread, intended as a gift for her parents, as a stepping stone.

The opera, left unfinished at Helle’s death, is willed, along with the rest of Helle’s music, to Frances. From this curious legacy, Frances must not only unravel the mysteries of the composer’s life and work but also confront the fateful love triangle into which she and Helle had been drawn.

Marie Antoinette “tells her own story” in this “sage, mercurial, and ravishing” novel (The New Yorker)Versailles tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen—though neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the palace she calls home.At once witty, entertaining, and astonishingly wise, this widely acclaimed novel is an enchanting meditation on girlhood, womanhood, architecture, and—above all—time and the soul’s true journey within it. Shaken free of the dust of history and calcified myth, Antoinette is “very much alive here, and she’s magnificent” (Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review).

An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists.Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.”Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis’s fiction are recognizable here—fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real—but the vehicle itself is utterly new.Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.