Labrador (Inscribed) - Hardcover

Davis, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0370312414 ISBN 13: 9780370312415

Publisher: Bodley Head, 1989

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Kathryn Davis is the recipient of a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and the 1999 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Davis teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and lives with her husband and daughter in Vermont.

From Publishers Weekly:

With extraordinary imagination and language, Labrador marks the debut of an unusual talent. On the surface a novel about the complex relationship between two sisters, it is also a frequently funny and often confounding tale that leaps from angels to demons and from ordinary life in a New Hampshire household to wild and enigmatic fables beyond all time and place. Willie, the older sister, is strikingly beautiful but contrary, and not the least bit sweet. She is a graceful dancer who grows to loathe her family"Mr. Noodle, the Mouse Queen, and Little Kitty." Kitty, a too-tall loner, becomes more and more accustomed to reinventing the world rather than confronting it. Often left at the mercy of the eccentric and superstitious Irish housekeeper, Kitty creates a cast of characters that inhabits her imagination. The feature player is Rogni, a somewhat inept angel, whose stories help Kitty to tune out her father's drinking and her mother's incompetence. When a long-lost grandfather appears, Kitty finds the approval and warmth she has long craved from a blood relation. She is so taken with the old man that she agrees to travel to the far reaches of Labrador, where he lives in primitive style with a woman of whom no one in the family approves. The events that follow, like one of Rogni's fables, are fantastic and bizarre. This is a mysterious, magical book, brimming with haunting images.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bodley Head
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0370312414
• ISBN 13: 9780370312415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232