The Seal Wife

Name: The Seal Wife
Brand: Brilliance Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Kathryn Harrison
ISBN: 9781543613353

Author: Kathryn Harrison

Narrator: Fred Stella

Unabridged: 5 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Published: 05/16/2017

Categories: Fiction

Synopsis

Here is the bestselling novel by "a writer of extraordinary gifts" (Tobias Wolff). Stunning, hypnotic, spare, The Seal Wife tells the story of a young scientist and his consuming love for a woman known only as the Aleut, a woman who refuses to speak. 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 convention. Kathryn Harrison brilliantly re-creates the Alaskan frontier during the period of the First World War as she explores with deep understanding the interior landscape of the human psyche—a landscape eerily continuous with the splendor and terror of the frozen frontier and the storms that blow over the earth and its face.

About Kathryn Harrison

Kathryn Harrison is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Binding Chair, Thicker Than Water, Exposure, and Poison. She has also written a memoir, The Kiss. Her personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Paltia

Bigelow the scientist, the Aleut woman, and frontier Alaska in 1915 are the focal points of this strange story. Bigelow seems at odds with himself. He arrives with high hopes to build a weather observatory. He has little knowledge on what his life will truly be like in this almost alien world. The s......more

Goodreads review by raheleh

Alaska. It seems I've read a few books recently to do with this frozen and dramatic country (see my glowing review for No Night is Too Long). The Seal Wife is set in frontier Alaska, and follows the story of a young meteorologist and his lovestruck obsession with a native woman in a time and place w......more

Goodreads review by Vonia

The author of The Kiss, her memoir addressing her viewpoint on her voluntary role in a romantic, sexual relationship with her father, Kathryn Harrison is equally shocking in The Seal Wife. Of course, knowing this is fiction, it is a little different. I will admit to having to deter myself from being......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer

I came across this book completely by accident -- the title caught my eye when I was sitting in the library. I picked it up and read the whole thing in an afternoon. It's a mesmerizing, atmospheric story of obsession set in the Alaskan frontier. The setting drew me in right away, as did Bigelow's ob......more