Böcker av Kathryn Davis

An eerily dreamlike memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists.Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can "try on personae like dresses." She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions-Woolf, Durrell, Bergman-sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, "climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling."Kathryn Davis's hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis's fiction are recognizable here-fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real-but the vehicle itself is utterly new.Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

Back in print, Kathryn Davis's riveting debut about the indelible pacts and hidden hatreds of sisterhoodLabrador is the story of two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the eldest, is willful, beautiful, and wayward; to Kitty, the youngest, she is the radiant center around which everything revolves. Kitty, too, is willful, but in the brooding manner of the inveterate loner. She is the one who is visited by an angel, Rogni, who reshapes her beliefs by telling her eerie, enigmatic fables that defy time and place, parables about bears, martyrs, and imprisoned daughters that seem to contain warnings about betrayals and violence to come. In the pared-down landscape of the far north, where the girls' grandfather has his home, Kitty escapes the orbit of her sister and begins to come to terms with the demons-and the enchantments-that have been her birthright from the start.In Labrador, Davis's first novel, one finds the hallmark lyricism and startling narrative swerves, the layered atmospherics, the fierce intelligence and wit, and above all the wild and transformative qualities of her imagination that have defined her work ever since.