Why did Kathleen love this book?
Like many of Lovric’s novels, Venice features prominently in this book, too, when the seven Harristown sisters, known as the Swiney Godivas, travel there to present their peculiar stage show showcasing their extraordinarily long hair.
Their story originates in Ireland and brings them to London as they scramble their way out of poverty and try to find love. Lovric’s stories always include some gothic, some grotesque, and some pure and enlivening love.
I was drawn into the narrator Manticory’s hopes for a better future while also, at times, feeling squeamish about the more unsavory lengths her sisters go to to find release from their poverty and, later, their eldest sister’s authoritarian rule.
Venice provides the backdrop for the dramatic denouement. Gruesome and gripping, but also beautiful storytelling.
1 author picked The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
It is the age of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when Europe burns with a passion for long-flowing locks. And when seven sisters, born into fatherless poverty in Ireland, grow up with hair cascading down their backs, to their ankles, and beyond, men are not slow to recognise their potential.
It begins with a singing and dancing septet, with Irish jigs kicked out in dusty church halls. But it is not the sisters' singing or their dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. And their hair will take dark-hearted…