Kathryn Harrison – författare

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.

The author of The Kiss tells the story of two women - a Chinese girl named May and her Western niece, Alice - whose lives intersect in turn-of-the-century Shanghai.

Within Canada the renewed importance of environmental issues in recent years has given rise to legislative and regulatory initiatives by both the federal and provincial governments which, in turn, has led to increased intergovernmental conflict. Recent jurisdictional disputes over the Quebec government's James Bay hydro development, the Al-Pac pulp mill and Oldman River dam in Alberta and the Rafferty-Alameda dam in Saskatchewan, to name but a few, have led to increasingly important debate on the appropriate balance of federal and provincial roles in environmental policy.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.Of particular importance to those in environmental studies, policy planning, political science, and law, Passing the Buck makes an original contribution to the literature of Canadian federalism and environmental policy. It is timely both in light of growing awareness of environmental challenges facing Canada and its examination of how we, and other countries around the world, adapt and rearrange our political systems to cope with large-scale ecological change.

'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.

A sumptuous novel of love and loss set in 17th-century Spain. From the author of the bestselling novel, ‘The Binding Chair’.As Marie Louise de Bourbon, niece of Louis XIV, journeys south from Versailles to marry the Spanish king, she is forced to abandon the cumbersome orange trees brought from her beloved Versailles, leaving them to wither in the chill Pyrenees. This loss presages the future that awaits her, in a court riven by intrigue, with an impotent husband who demands an heir. Marie’s fate is dreamed of by Francisca de Luarca, as she sits in her prison cell far from the Queen’s chamber. This imaginative Castilian silk grower's daughter has fallen passionately and dangerously in love with a young priest.In this luscious, hypnotic novel, Kathryn Harrison twists together their stories, bringing to vivid life the wonders and the horrors of 17th-century Spain, a world convulsed by poverty and religious upheaval.

From the bestselling author of THE BINDING CHAIR, a searing memoir of a four-year affair between the author and her father.’My father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.’Kathryn Harrison’s parents married aged 17 but were forced apart by disapproving parents within a year. By which time their only child, Kathryn, had been born. She was not to see her father again until she was ten. Instantly, the two were attracted; they even looked alike. By the time Kathryn was twenty the two had fallen into a passionate affair. Her relationship with her mother had never been easy and now there was this added complication, made worse by the obvious love which still existed between her parents for each other. In this beautiful, honest and shocking account of the years of her affair with her father, Kathryn Harrison confirms her growing reputation as one of the most significant literary voices of our times.