The Flaming Corsage

Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, this sixth novel in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle follows the lives of Edward Daugherty, a first generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright, and Katrina Taylor, a beautiful, seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life.  Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether.  The Flaming Corsage evocatively portrays the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.