Loving Frank

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want toswim 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 groundbreaking historical novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America's greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Mamah's 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. Horan's Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world, and her unforgettable journey, marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leads inexorably to this novel's stunning conclusion.

Fact and fiction are brilliantly blended in this compelling novel about the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, the wife of a couple whose home Wright built in 1904. Each married with children when they met in Oak Park, Illinois, Frank and Mamah began a clandestine affair that eventually led them to flee to Europe, devastating their families and shocking Chicago society.

Based on seven years of meticulous research, this groundbreaking historical novel is not only an exquisite work of fiction, but is given added resonance by its adherence to remarkable real-life characters and unfolding events, scandalous in their day. Nancy Horan brings Mamah to life as she illuminates the conflicts and sacrifices of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual.

More than a powerful love story, Loving Frank is a novel about breaking old rules and living new ideas that will stay in the minds of listeners long after its unbearably poignant conclusion.