The most fascinating sections examine Mamah's attempts to intellectualise her actions, in particular her attachment to proto-feminist thinking. As she sticks closely to the facts – old newspaper reports, letters, contemporary – there proves little need for novelistic invention. Debut novelist Nancy Horan, herself a one-time resident of Oak Park, does an impressive job of rescuing Mamah from the footnotes of history.
No one could have predicted the final chapter of an affair that, five years later, was to leave two families devastated by an act of unimaginable violence. A new home and a tasteful garage installation later, the couple left for Europe, abandoning their spouses, nine children and a tabloid press hungry for details. In 1907, while designing a "prairie house" in Oak Park, Illinois, Wright fell in love with his client, the beautiful and clever Mrs Mamah Borthwick Cheney. SCEPTRE £7.99 (416PP) (FREE P&P) FROM 08Don't let the sappy title put you off this steely re-telling of one of the more scandalous chapters in the life of the great American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
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