Search results for ""author macdonald harris""

Here is a delight: MacDonald Harris''s colourful, fanciful, and moving Herma, the story of a wilful young woman who conquers the musical world of the Belle Epoque. Herma is many things: a glamorous story of a singer who rises from the choir of a country church to stardom at the Paris Opera: the parallel adventures of her agent and friendly enemy Fred Hite, filled with the excitement of the early days of aviation; and a provocative sexual intrigue whose twinned her and heroine, not brother and sister, are forbidden to each other by the secret that lies at the centre of their odd and intimate relationship. From its evocative beginnings in the pastoral Southern California of the turn of the century, Herma moves on to larger worlds: first the brash, adolescent San Francisco of the period, then the Earthquake, then the international world of opera in Paris at the most luxurious, opulent, and decadent moment of its history. Erotic, bejewelled, crowded with incident and a big, vivid cast of c

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In 1976 Farrar Strauss in the USA and Gollancz in the UK, published the 5th novel by an American writer who had been gathering momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. It was both an intense love story and a Jules Verne-type science fiction adventure, centred on an attempt by a Swedish scientist, an American journalist and a French speaking adventurer to become the first people to set foot on the North Pole. To arrive there and return, borne on the wind by a huge red and white hydrogen balloon. The book was a critical sensation, and was runner up for the National Book Awards in 1977. What was not known at the time of first publication, nor indeed when Galileo reissued this extraordinary book in 2011, was that the author had actually based this fiction on a real event: the 1897 attempt by S. A Andree to fly to the North Pole. This is a new edition, the first in a uniform presentation of selected Harris works.

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