Enchantments Kathryn Harrison 9780007476473 [USED COPY]

From the author of The Kiss, a magical, riveting story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia's last Tsar.

New Year's Day, St Petersburg, 1917. Divers pull the body of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, from the icy waters of the Neva River. Within hours, his daughters are taken to the Royal Palace, where the Tsarina makes a shocking request: would Masha, eighteen, take on her father's role as healer to the Tsarevitch Alyosha?

Two months later, revolution has toppled the Tsar, and the entire family is placed under house arrest. Trapped together in harsh conditions, Masha and Alyosha find solace in one another's company. Two teenagers, with radically different experiences of the Romanov's ill-fated reign, create a private realm of magic and love, as Masha introduces Alyosha to the wild and beautiful land he will never rule.

'A stupendous work of historical imagination' Peter Carey

KATHRYN HARRISON has written the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy. Her autobiographical work includes The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, The Road to Santiago, and The Mother
Knot. She has also written a biography, St. Therese of Lisieux, and, most recently, a book of true crime, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family.

She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their three children.

'A sumptuous, atmospheric account of the last days of the Romanovs from the perspective of Rasputin's daughter, Enchantments animates a kaleidoscopic breadth of historical detail with the sensuous, transporting prose that is Kathryn Harrison's trademark.' Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad

'Ask yourself who, in all the world, would be the best novelist to imagine being Rasputin's daughter. Kathryn Harrison makes the answer obvious. Her Enchantments is a stupendous work of historical imagination.' Peter Carey

'A marvelous writer, one of the best at work today. She is unflinching, however difficult her material... Few authors of serious literary fiction are so daring' Daily Telegraph

'Kathryn Harrison has written some of the most daringly, darkly uncompromising books I've read' Julie Myerson

'Splendid and surprising ... Kathryn Harrison has given us something enduring' New York Times

'Marvellously evocative ... The stories that Masha spins out for the bed-bound tsarevich flow out effortlessly in her plain, clear voice, making many of them indeed enchanting' Guardian