Biblioteka Publiczna

The binding chair : a novel [ang.]

Autor: Harrison, Kathryn

From the author of the best-selling memoir, The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison`s unforgettable fourth novel takes us to Shanghai as the nineteenth century ends.

Beautiful, charismatic and destructive May escapes an arranged marriage in rural China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where, in 1899, she meets Arthur, an Australian whose philanthropic pursuits lead him into one scrape after another. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, Arthur calls on May not for his pleasure

but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself immediately and helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet. Reforming .May is out of the question, so Arthur marries her instead, and brings `ner home to live with his sister Dolly, her husband Dick, and their two girls Alice and Cecily. In Alice May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for the child she has lost. And it is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve year old is caught preparing her aunt°s opium pipe, Alice is enrolled in a London boarding school, far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will come to reclaim her, and to control the whole family.

Kathryn Harrison`s poised and elegant prose tells a startling - by turns shocking and. hilarious - story of travel and flight, the search for home and the need to escape it. Among scenes of astonishing beauty and Cruelty, where traditions and cultures clash, tragedy threatens a world built on the banks of unsettled waters - from the filthy, bustling Whangpoo River to the lake of blood in the Chinese afterworld.

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