Ballantine Books
April 2008
On Sale: April 8, 2008
Featuring: Frank Lloyd Wright
400 pages ISBN: 0345495004 EAN: 9780345495006 Paperback Add to Wish List
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of Americaβs greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheneyβs profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horanβs Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamahβs is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novelβs stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
βLoving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. Itβs mesmerizing and fascinatingβfilled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years agoβall gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.β βLauren Belfer, author of City of Light
βThis graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.β ββScott Turow
βIt takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wrightβs love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.β ββJane Hamilton
βI admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt sheβll ever leave.β βElizabeth Berg
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