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    The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
    The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
    The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
    Audiobook17 hours

    The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

    Written by Michelle Lovric

    Narrated by Caroline Lennon

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It begins with a singing and dancing septet in dusty church halls. But it is not the sisters' dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. And their hair will pull them out of poverty, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It will bring some of them love and each of them loss. For their fame and fortune will come at a terrible price...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateMar 5, 2015
    ISBN9781471284366
    The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters
    Author

    Michelle Lovric

    Michelle Lovric is the author of five novels - Carnevale, The Floating Book (winner of a London Arts Award and chosen as a W H Smith Read of the Week) and The Remedy (longlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction) - as well as four children's novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. She combines her fiction work with editing, designing and producing literary anthologies including her own translations of Latin and Italian poetry. Her book Love Letters was a New York Times bestseller. Lovric divides her time between London and Venice, and holds workshops in both places with published writers of poetry and prose, fiction and memoir. www.michellelovric.com

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    Reviews for The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

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    • 5/5
      I absolutely could not put this book down. I can't believe that this is the first book I've read by Michelle Lovric, it will definitely not be my last.

      The Swiney sisters were amazing characters and they sucked me in immediately. I found their rise to fame spectacular and I loved that they all traveled to Venice. The book oozed Irishness and and matched its time period perfectly. I could not recommend more highly.

      I received this book as a GoodReads First Reads.
    • 5/5
      Even amid the potato famine in 1850s rural Ireland, the seven Swiney sisters are gifted with an abundance of glorious curls. After one of their number, Manticory, narrowly escapes assault because of her red locks, and desperate to leave the abject poverty of their Harristown hovel behind them, the eldest sister, Darcy, comes up with a cunning plan: to sing and dance on the stage and show their hair to a paying public, at a time when the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood immortalises long hair as the essence of femininity in literature and art, and when a decent woman is only supposed to expose the glory of her full head of hair to her husband in the privacy of their own home. By virtue of the sisters’ final act of follicular exposure, there is a whiff of scandal and notoriety about their stage act, and they – predictably – very quickly earn countrywide fame and a fortune besides. But at what point does the Swiney Godivas’ exploitation of a male obsession turn against them, and they become the exploited? As the sisters discover to their cost, celebrity is not all it’s cracked up to be.As the author helpfully points out in the Historical Notes section at the end of the novel, and despite its highly original feel, the tale of the seven Swiney sisters is actually inspired by the Seven Sutherland Sisters of Niagara County, New York State in the second half of the 19th century. This fictional portrayal is narrated in the first person by Manticory, the middle sister with the Titian locks, and tells the story of the seven sisters from their fatherless childhood in rural Ireland during the potato famine to their reaching adulthood and retiring to Venice in the 1870s. Manticory is an aspiring writer who seemingly confides in the reader by entrusting them with the real biography of the so-called Swiney Godivas, which is rather different from their projected and public image, split as they are into two sisterly tribes with Darcy being the feared head of the household whom no one dares to contradict, even their harassed mother. All the sisters, as well as the characters entering into their lives, are wonderfully realised with distinctly different personalities, and Manticory’s compelling narration had me entranced from the first page; the inventive invectives exchanged in an Oirish twang between the sisters or Darcy and her archenemy Eileen O’Reilly are particularly enjoyable, but there is heartbreak, loss and poignancy too (the passages describing the victims of the potato famine are brief but extremely powerful, and for me will provide the mental picture of that dark period in Irish history for a long time). Written in beautiful prose to savour, Michelle Lovric has created unforgettable characters and land- and cityscapes that are rich in colour, texture and atmosphere. But there are also darker undercurrents at play here about obsession, the price of fame and celebrity and exploitation in its many forms. Yet I cannot wholeheartedly award it the five-stars rating it should be due as there are a few plot strands that are rather over the top in my opinion, especially towards the end of the book, and the final resolution to a particular problem is resolved rather too neatly to be entirely believable. In short, an immensely enjoyable, affecting and thought-provoking novel to treasure which I will doubtless pick up and read again. Four and a half stars.(This review was first written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.)