The Kiss

A searing account of a four-year affair between the author and her father.

‘My father takes my face in his hands. He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids.’

Kathryn Harrison’s parents married aged seventeen but were forced apart by disapproving parents within a year. By which time their only child, Kathryn, had been born. She was not to see her father again until she was ten. Instantly, the two were attracted; they even looked alike. By the time Kathryn was twenty the two had fallen into a passionate affair. Her relationship with her mother had never been easy and now there was this added complication, made worse by the obvious love that still existed between her parents. In this beautiful, honest and shocking account of the years of her affair with her father, Kathryn Harrison confirms her growing reputation as one of the most significant literary voices of our times.