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Simon & Schuster
February 2015
On Sale: February 10, 2015
Featuring: Alice Dickinson; Mabel Loomis Todd; Nick Crocker
ISBN: 1476740402
EAN: 9781476740409
Kindle: B00GEEB6R2
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and the author of
Motherland, a novel about two love affairs set in
Amherst—one in the present, one in the past, and both
presided over by Emily Dickinson. Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London,
decides to take time off work to research her idea for a
screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous
love affair that took place between a young, Amherst college
faculty wife, Mabel Loomis Todd, and the college’s
treasurer, Austin Dickinson, in the 1880s. Austin,
twenty-four years Mabel’s senior and married, was the
brother of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, whose house
provided the setting for Austin and Mabel’s trysts. Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick
Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice
researches Austin and Mabel’s story and Emily’s role in
their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an
affair that, of course, they both know echoes the affair
that she’s writing about in her screenplay. Interspersed with Alice’s complicated love story is the
story of Austin and Mabel, historically accurate and
meticulously recreated from their voluminous letters and
diaries. Using the poems of Emily Dickinson throughout,
Amherst is an exploration of the nature of passionate love,
its delusions, and its glories. This novel is playful and
scholarly, sexy and smart, and reminds us that the games we
play when we fall in love have not changed that much over
the years.
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