A New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, Kathryn Davis's "dazzling first novel" (Kirkus Reviews) "transforms a literary commonplace -- a young girl's transition from childhood to adulthood -- into a brilliantly original story" (Belles Lettres). In LABRADOR, Davis conjures two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the elder, is beautiful and wayward. Kitty, the younger, is a loner whose only means of escaping the bewitching influence of her sister is to follow her grandfather to his home in Labrador, where she cannot avoid confronting the demons that haunt her. A tale of two sisters and the ambiguous, sometimes destructive ties that bind them, LABRADOR is a tender meditation on love, its joys, its limitations, and its hidden bitterness.

Labrador

Literature & Fiction

Kathryn Davis

Literary

Mariner Books

A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there&#8213;paths on which they still seem to be traveling. The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis' sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit. Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls&#8213;a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

The Silk Road: A Novel

Blackstone Publishing

Kathryn Davis's riveting debut about the indelible pacts and hidden hatreds of sisterhood Labrador 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. Kathryn Davis conjures a bewitching tale of the rifts and reparation that occur between two girls who are nothing alike but have only each other to turn to, all the while destabilizing our assumptions about what a coming-of-age story is supposed to be. In Labrador one can find the origins of Davis's hallmark lyricism and startling narrative swerves, her layered atmospherics, her fierce intelligence and wit, and above all the wild and transformative qualities of her imagination.

Labrador: A Novel

Hell--part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story--is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a nineteenth-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance, as if it might be possible to forestall disaster. Meanwhile, Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of the great culinary artist and chef to Napoleon, Antonin Carême.

Hell: A Novel

The prize-winning author of Versailles tells the story of a small New England village unsettled by a young girl's unearthly gift. In Varennes, a town near the Canadian border, three girls come across the body of a dead man on the local lake's beach. Two of them run to get help, but twelve-year-old Mees Kipp stays with the body and somehow, inexplicably, brings it back to life. Her mysterious gift is at the center of this haunting and transcendent novel. The Thin Place is the story of these girls, their town, and the worldly and otherworldly forces that come into play there over one summer. Writing at the peak of her powers, Kathryn Davis draws on commonplace forms-police blotters, garden almanacs, Sunday sermons, horoscopes, and diaries-to convey the rich rhythms of life in Varennes. From the ladies in the old-folks' home to trappers, lawyers, teachers, ministers, drug addicts-even the dogs and cats, beavers and bears-she peoples this novel with astonishingly vivid beings. The extraordinary comes to visit an ordinary town. "A delightful, surprise-filled narrative: Davis's best yet."-Kirkus Review(starred review) "Cosmic in her vision, provocative and comic in her storytelling, Kathryn Davis draws on sources as diverse as quantum physics and tales of saints and miracles and makes place a key element in her exploratory fiction."-Booklist (starred review) "Never has Davis' prose seemed more effortless...The Thin Place is a bright, shimmering book."-Chicago Sun-Times

The Thin Place

Contemporary

Tantor Audio

A New York Times Editor's Choice Fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé, the mild, abstracted Louis. He will become the sixteenth Louis to reign in France, and Antoinette will be his queen, although neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles that they have been summoned to play. Antoinette is hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, the larger-than-life figures of Mirabeau, Du Barry, and Robespierre, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home. Antoinette gives birth to four children, two of whom will outlive her; she falls in love; she dies at the guillotine. A meditation on time and the soul's true journey within it.

Versailles

Wheeler Publishing

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