About Enchantments
- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Random House (March 6, 2012)
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.
“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, author of Parrot and Olivier in America
About Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison is the author of the memoirs The Kiss and The Mother Knot. She has also written the novels Envy, The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water; a travel memoir, The Road to Santiago; a biography, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; and a collection of essays, Seeking Rapture. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.
Learn more about Kathryn and her work at her website, kathrynharrison.com.
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Kathryn Harrison’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, March 5th: Unabridged Chick
Tuesday, March 6th: Chaotic Compendiums
Wednesday, March 7th: The Literate Housewife Review
Thursday, March 8th: Dolce Bellezza
Monday, March 12th: Broken Teepee
Tuesday, March 13th: Luxury Reading
Thursday, March 15th: The Lost Entwife
Monday, March 19th: Let Them Read Books
Tuesday, March 20th: Unabridged Chick – author interview
Friday, March 23rd: The Muse in the Fog Book Review
Saturday, March 24th: Stiletto Storytime
Monday, March 26th: A Library of My Own
Wednesday, March 28th: Col Reads
Thursday, March 29th: Life in Review
Friday, April 6th: Library of Clean Reads