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A Novel
by Michelle Lovric
It's rural Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, when Europe burns with a passion for long, flowing locks. So when seven sisters, born into fatherless poverty, grow up with hair cascading down their backs, to their ankles, and beyond, men are not slow to recognize their potential.
Soon, they're a singing and dancing septet: Irish jigs kicked out in dusty church halls. But it is not their singing or their dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. In an Ireland still hungry and melancholy with the Great Famine, the Swiney hair is a rich offering. And their hair will take dark-hearted Darcy, bickering twins Berenice and Enda, plain Pertilly, gentle Oona, wild Ida, and fearful, flame-haired Manticory—the writer of their on- and off-stage adventures—out of poverty, through the dance halls of Ireland, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It will bring them suitors and obsessive admirers, it will bring some of them love and each of them loss. For their past trails behind the sisters like the tresses on their heads and their fame and fortune will come at a terrible price.
Rich in period detail, peopled by a bewitching cast of characters, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is a tale of exploitation and celebrity, illegitimacy and sibling rivalry, love triangles and financial skullduggery, of death and devilry. And a very great deal of hair.
"Momentum falters midway though due to an overabundance of exposition, while a section set in Venice never quite convinces despite its precision of detail. Still, the book's rollicking, earthy voice evokes 19th-century Ireland with gusto" - Publishers Weekly
"Foreboding dark and melancholy overtones mirror the tenor of the times and foreshadow the inherent sorrow of the tale." - Booklist
"While the novel has some factual basis—an afterword recounts the author's research on the Victorian hair fetish—the plot twists are bizarre, almost mythic in tone. For sophisticated readers." - Library Journal
"A dazzling, sometimes-lurid yet always lively adventure, indeed." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The True and Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Lovric is the author of four novels — Carnevale, The Floating Book (winner of a London Arts Award), The Remedy (longlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize) and The Book of Human Skin, as well as four children's books. Her book Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion was a New York Times bestseller. She divides her time between London and Venice. www.michellelovric.com
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