Enchantments

FromKathryn Harrison, one of America's most admired literary voices, comes agorgeously written, enthralling novel set in the final days of Russia's RomanovEmpire.

St.Petersburg, 1917. After Rasputin's body is pulled from the icy waters of theNeva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at theimperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family-including the headstrongPrince Alyosha. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin'smiraculous healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Aloysha, whosuffers from hemophilia, a blood disease that keeps the boy confined to hissickbed, lest a simple scrape or bump prove fatal.

Twomonths after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, andBolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends intocivil war, Masha and Alyosha grieve the loss of their former lives, findingsolace in each other's company. To escape the confinement of the palace, theytell stories-some embellished and some entirely imagined-about Nikolay andAlexandra's courtship, Rasputin's many exploits, and the wild and wonderfulcountry on the brink of an irrevocable transformation. In the worlds of theirimagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future thatwill never come to pass feels close at hand.

Mesmerizing,haunting, and told in Kathryn Harrison's signature crystalline prose, Enchantmentsis a love story about two people who come together as everything around them isfalling apart.

Kathryn Harrisonis the author of the memoirs The Kiss and The Mother Knot. Shehas also written the novels Envy, The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison,Exposure, and Thicker Than Water; a travel memoir, The Road toSantiago; a biography, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; and a collection ofessays, Seeking Rapture. She lives in New York with her husband, thenovelist Colin Harrison, and their children.

Advance praise for Enchantments

“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

“Kathryn Harrison may be best known for her personal honesty, her willingness to explore and illuminate her own and, by implication, all of our most fearfully guarded secrets. But it could well be that in the end her true genius may be in her ability locate within the crevices of history moments of poetry and passion that electrify the reader. In Enchantments, Ms. Harrison takes us on a magic carpet ride to Russia one hundred years ago, and with perfect grace, impeccable style, and great narrative flair, she gives us a whole wounded world that is for the course of this utterly compelling novel as real as our own lives. Actually: more.”—Scott Spencer, author of Man in the Woods and Endless Love

“Enchantments is wonderful: fascinating, informative, historically persuasive, and full of sympathy and tenderness for its endearing characters. This is Kathryn Harrison at her lyrical best.”—Ron Hansen, author of A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford