LOVING FRANK
Nancy Horan
Ballantine
Fiction
Hardcover: 0345494997
Paperback: 9780345495006

• Critical Praise
• Read a Review
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview -- August 10, 2007
• Reading Group Guide

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 America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’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. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s 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.

LOVING FRANK © Copyright 2008 by Nancy Horan. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

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Critical Praise

"It 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 Wright's love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate. If I had been Mamah and if a person can be thrilled beyond the grave, well then, I would be thrilled that Nancy Horan had told my story with such understanding and with such grace."

--- Jane Hamilton, author of WHEN MADELINE WAS YOUNG

"This 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."

--- Scott Turow

"I 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. Most of all, though, I am in awe of the way Nancy Horan has brought alive every aspect of a woman fighting an exquisitely painful battle: that of reconciling the passion and truth in claiming a soul mate found too late against the great love of one's children and the need to conform. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this book; I doubt she'll ever leave."

--- Elizabeth Berg, author of WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE

"LOVING FRANK is one of those novels that takes over your life. It's mesmerizing and fascinating––filled with complex characters, deep passions,tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture,andthe colorful immediacyof daily life ahundred years ago––all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency."

--- Lauren Belfer, author of CITY OF LIGHT

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