Product Description

Before she wrote The Time Traveler's Wife, now a bestseller all around the world, Audrey Niffenegger's books were beautiful, handmade, exquisitely illustrated tales, published in editions as small as ten copies. They took many years to create, were bought by collectors and have been seen by few people. At last, as part of its acclaimed and very successful list of graphic books, Cape is delighted to publish The Three Incestuous Sisters in a beautiful edition at an affordable price. It is the story of three sisters, Clothilde, Ophile and Bettine, who live together in a lonely house by the sea. All three are rivals for the love of Paris, the lighthouse-keeper's son. When Paris chooses Bettine, and she becomes pregnant, the other sisters are jealous. Eventually, after the baby is born, they cause Bettine's death. Paris runs away to sea and Ophile, overwhelmed by remorse, throws herself from the lighthouse. Clothilde lives on in the house, sad and alone. Then one day a circus comes to town. In it is an amazing flying boy. She recognizes him as Bettine's child...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8721 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

Neel Mukherjee, The Times
'This book is a thing of exquisite beauty, a joy forever'

From the Publisher
A magical illustrated book - a 'visual novel' - by the bestselling author of The Time Traveler's Wife.

About the Author
Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a professor at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing and fine edition book production. The Three Incestuous Sisters was originally published in an edition of ten copies in 1998, having taken thirteen years to create. Audrey Niffenegger's first novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, was published in 2003 and was a bestseller around the world. A film, starring Brad Pitt, will go into production very shortly.

Customer Reviews

Work of love
Swayed by a Sunday Times review, I bought this book and it is certainly a lovely looking work and obviously a labour of love. Each page is a colour illustration with minimal text, since the story is told through the pictures. Don't be put off by the title, there is nothing perverted about this story! It's a tale of love, jealousy, loss and redemption and is a lovely thing to own, especially at the Amazon price! It wasn't something I, personally, would come back to again and again so I have passed it on to someone else to enjoy but at such a good price for such a nice looking thing, take a chance and find out for yourself!

A lovely picture novel...
For anyone looking for the next 'Time Travellers Wife' this book is not for you. It is however, a beautifully designed picture novel which could easily be read in minutes but spending a little longer looking at each image makes the experience of 'reading' this well worthwhile.

The illustrations are fantastically quirky, the story is both sad and funny and all in all this is a really unique book that will take pride of place on any bookshelf.

Well worth a look

lovely and hypnotic
Here it is--Audrey Niffenegger's strange follow-up to her wildly popular novel "The Time Traveler's Wife." The new book is a "visual novel" of 176 pages and can be read in well under an hour--though, hopefully, you'll spend days pouring over the gorgeous pictures. Open up the book and you find that for every picture on a right-hand page there is a brief narrative caption on the left-hand page. I can best describe the artwork as being a lot like Edward Gorey (actually, the whole aesthetic of the book is Gorey-esque), a bit like Gustav Klimt (imagine Gorey getting it into his head to do Klimt figures), and not a small bit like the art of Dominic Kulcsar on his website The Wmmvrrvrrmm Place--really, up till now Dominic is the only person I know of who made good use of floating fetuses.

And the book isn't as creepy as it sounds. The "incest" business comes in this way. . . The story concerns three lonely sisters. The youngest sister falls in love with a strange man, and the oldest sister becomes wickedly jealous, thinking that she too loves the young man. When the youngest sister becomes pregnant, the middle sister begins a mystical relationship with the fetus, becoming her unborn nephew's spiritual mentor. That's about as weird as it gets--but I suppose that's weird enough!