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 colleges treasurer, Austin Dickinson, in the 1880s. Austin, twenty-four years Mabels senior and married, was the brother of the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, whose house provided the setting for Austin and Mabels trysts. Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties.
