Лучшие книги Кэтрин Харрисон

We meet at airports. We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one will recognize us. A "man of God" is how someone described my father to me. I don 't remember who. Not my mother. I'm young enough that I take the words to mean he has magical properties and that he is good, better than other people. With his hand under my chin, my father draws my face toward his own. He touches his lips to mine. I stiffen. I am frightened by the kiss. I know it wrong, and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret.

Francisca de Luarac, the daughter of a poor Spanish silk grower, is a dreamer of fabulous dreams. Marie Louise de Bourbon, the niece of Louis XIV, dances in slippers of fine Spanish silk in the French Court of the Sun King and imagines her own enchanted future. Born on the same day - in an age when superstition, repression, and the Inquisition reign - the lives of these two young women unfold in tandem, barely touching. Each hoards the memory of her adored lost mother like an amulet.
Francica's obsession with her lover, a Catholick priest, will shaper her fate. Marie Loouise is yoked by political expediency to the mad, imptoent Carlos II of Spain. But even as their twin destinies spiral inexorably toward disaster, both Queen and commoner cultivate a dangerous, secret life dedicated to resistance, transcendence, and love.
Written in gorgeous prose that has the sheen of silk, Kathryn Harrison's Poison vividlyreminds us of the persistence of desire, the passion that exists between mothers and daughters, and the sorcery of dreams.

Every era must retell and reimagine the Maid of Orleans's extraordinary story in its own way, and in Joan 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.

The 'Mad Monk' Rasputin has been murdered, his body found floating down the icy Neva River. In the belief that his daughter Masha possesses the mystic's gift for healing, the Imperial family summon her to wait on the sickly young prince, Tsarevitch Alyosha.
But when the Bolshevik Revolution forces the Tsar to abdicate, the family and their attendants are placed under house arrest. Trapped together, Masha and Alyosha find unlikely solace in one another's company.
From within the walls of the palace the two teenagers create a private realm of magic and love, as Masha introduces the young Tsarevitch to a wild and beautiful land he will never live to rule.

Book Description "Kathryn Harrison is a wonderful writer…Spellbinding." - The New York Times Book Review "A juicy story of psychosexual suspence" - The Wall Street Journal

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, largely unknown when she died in a Carmelite convent at the age of twenty-four, became - through her posthumously published autobiography - one of the world's most influential religious figures.
In Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, bestselling novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison brings to the saint's life her storytelling gift and deep insight as she reveals the hopes and fears of the young girl behind the religious icon.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux shows us the pampered daughter of successful and deeply religious tradespeople who - through a personal appeal to the pope - entered a convent at the early age of fifteen. There, Thérèse embraced sacrifice and self-renunciation in a single-minded pursuit of the "nothingness" she felt would bring her closer to God.
With feeling, Harrison shows us the sensitive four-year-old whose mother's death haunted her forever and contributed to the ascetic spirituality that strengthened her to embrace even the deadly throes of tuberculosis.
Tellingly placed in the context of late-nineteenth-century French social and religious practices, this is a powerful story of a life lived with enormous passion and a searing, triumphant voyage of the spirit.