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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 Amherstβone 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 collegeβs treasurer, Austin Dickinson, in the 1880s. Austin, twenty-four years Mabelβs senior and married, was the brother of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, whose house provided the setting for Austin and Mabelβs trysts. Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice researches Austin and Mabelβs story and Emilyβs role in their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an affair that, of course, they both know echoes the affair that sheβs writing about in her screenplay. Interspersed with Aliceβs 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.
 Media BuzzNews at 4: Wednesday Reads - February 25, 2015
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