The Seal Wife » (Unabridged)

Kathryn Harrison is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Binding Chair, Thicker Than Water, Exposure, and Poison. She has also written a memoir, The Kiss. Her personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children.

A stunning and hypnotic novel by "a writer of extraordinary gifts" [Tobias Wolff], The Seal Wife tells the story of a young scientist and his consuming love for a woman known as Aleut. In 1915, Bigelow is sent to establish a weather observatory in Anchorage, Alaska, and finds that nothing has prepared him for the loneliness of a railroad town of over two thousand men and only a handful of women, of winter nights twenty hours long. And nothing can protect him from obsession-both with a woman, who seems in her silence and mystery to possess the power to destroy his life forever, and with the weather kite he designs to fly higher than any kite has ever flown before, a kite with which Bigelow plans to penetrate and know not just the sky but the heavens.

A novel of passions both dangerous and generative, The Seal Wife explores the nature of desire and its ability to propel an individual beyond himself and outside conventions. Harrison brilliantly re-creates the Alaskan frontier during the period of the first World War and in lyrical prose explores the interior landscape of the psyche and human emotions - a landscape eerily continuous with the splendor and terror of the frozen frontier, the storms that blow over the earth and its face.

New Yorker

In previous books, Harrison has leaned toward the lurid -- incest, the Spanish Inquisition, Chinese foot-binding -- but here she offers a more muted tale, set in Alaska in the early nineteen-hundreds. A lonely meteorologist named Bigelow yearns for female companionship, and it comes in slippery forms: a silent Aleut who skins animals before sex; a chatty prostitute who obligingly wears a gag during intercourse; a shopkeeper's daughter who stammers so violently that she communicates only through written notes. For all the eccentricity of its characters, however, the story remains inert; Harrison seems less interested in Bigelow's torment than in her own thoughts on the unpredictability of desire.