Audiobooks by Kathryn Harrison

'Stunning... This is Kathryn Harrison in top form.' --Augusten Burroughs 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.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Rebecca Lowman (Narrator)

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Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose 'voices' moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Dreyer, and Robert Bresson. Was she a divinely inspired saint? A schizophrenic? A demonically possessed heretic, as her persecutors and captors tried to prove? Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans's extraordinary story in its own way, and inJoan of Arc: A Life Transfigured,the superb novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time-a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage, and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

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Enchantments

From Kathryn Harrison, one of America's most admired literary voices, comes a gorgeously written, enthralling novel set in the final days of Russia's Romanov Empire. St. Petersburg, 1917. After Rasputin's body is pulled from the icy waters of the Neva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family—including the headstrong Prince Alyosha. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin's miraculous healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Aloysha, who suffers from hemophilia, a blood disease that keeps the boy confined to his sickbed, lest a simple scrape or bump prove fatal. Two months after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha grieve the loss of their former lives, finding solace in each other's company. To escape the confinement of the palace, they tell stories—some embellished and some entirely imagined—about Nikolay and Alexandra's courtship, Rasputin's many exploits, and the wild and wonderful country on the brink of an irrevocable transformation. In the worlds of their imagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future that will never come to pass feels close at hand. Mesmerizing, haunting, and told in Kathryn Harrison's signature crystalline prose, Enchantments is a love story about two people who come together as everything around them is falling apart.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Julia Emelin, Rustam Kasymov (Narrator)

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The Seal Wife

A stunning and hypnotic novel by "a writer of extraordinary gifts" [Tobias Wolff], The Seal Wife tells the story of a young scientist and his consuming love for a woman known as Aleut. In 1915, Bigelow is sent to establish a weather observatory in Anchorage, Alaska, and finds that nothing has prepared him for the loneliness of a railroad town of over two thousand men and only a handful of women, of winter nights twenty hours long. And nothing can protect him from obsession-both with a woman, who seems in her silence and mystery to possess the power to destroy his life forever, and with the weather kite he designs to fly higher than any kite has ever flown before, a kite with which Bigelow plans to penetrate and know not just the sky but the heavens. 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 conventions. Harrison brilliantly re-creates the Alaskan frontier during the period of the first World War and in lyrical prose explores the interior landscape of the psyche and human emotions - a landscape eerily continuous with the splendor and terror of the frozen frontier, the storms that blow over the earth and its face.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Fred Stella (Narrator)

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Saint Therese of Lisieux

St. Therese of Lisieux, largely unknown when she died in a Carmelite convent at the age of 24, became, through her posthumously published autobiography, one of the world's most influential religious figures. No less a luminary than Andre Gide modeled one of his characters after her in his novel Strait is the Gate. Originally the pampered daughter of successful and highly religious tradespeople, Therese appealed personally to the Pope to let her enter the convent at the age of 15. There, Therese embraced sacrifice and self-renunciation in a single-minded pursuit of the "nothingness" she felt would bring her closer to God. Her ascetic practices enabled her to undergo even the scourge of tuberculosis, which only deepened her spiritual intensity even as it would take her life.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Kate Reading (Narrator)

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Poison

In this richly textured historical novel, best-selling author Kathryn Harrison spins a mesmerizing tale of forbidden passion and terrifying superstition in 17th-century Spain. As the Spanish Inquisition conducts its ruthless reign of terror, the lives of two women-one, the free spirited daughter of a poor silk farmer; the other, the French princess doomed to marry the deformed King of Spain-unravel like the cocoons of silkworms. A nationally-acclaimed writer of exquisite talents, Kathryn Harrison will leave you breathless.

Kathryn Harrison (Author), Barbara Caruso (Narrator)

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