Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat, The Testament of Loki and many other bestselling novels, plus the novella The Blue Salt Road, short stories, screenplays and cookbooks. Her books are published in more than 50 countries and have won numerous awards. The Evil Seed, Sleep, Pale Sister and Chocolat were published before she retired from teaching to become an author full-time. In Sleep, Pale Sister, Henry Chester is an artist in the late 19th century, specializing in sentimental paintings of young girls. At the same time fascinated and repelled by female sensuality, he has spent much of his career searching for the Perfect Woman - one who embodies his conflicting ideals of innocence, passivity and sexual availability. In Effie, a life model only nine years old, he finally believes he has found her. As soon as she is old enough, Henry marries Effie, having moulded and educated her to suit his purposes, but the infatuated young woman soon realizes that the man she has married is not the loving father-figure she imagined him to be. Repressed and infantilized by her husband, increasingly dependent on the laudanum he gives her for her "nerves" and desperate for affection, Effie becomes involved with the cheerily amoral Mose Harper and enters an illicit affair with him which leads her into a dangerous underworld of prostitution, revenge, deceit and murder… You can listen online to free English audiobook “Sleep, Pale Sister” by Joanne Harris on our website.
