Under the wide and starry sky : a novel

Title:

Author:

Horan, Nancy.

Personal Author:

Horan, Nancy.

ISBN:

9780345516534

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

474 pages ; 25 cm

Abstract:

Imagines the unconventional love affair of Scottish literary giant Robert Louis Stevenson and American divorcée? Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who after meeting in rural France take refuge from their unhappy lives and embark on two shared decades of international turbulence.

Personal Subject:

Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift, 1840-1914-Fiction.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894-Fiction.

Subject Term:

Authors -- Fiction.

Genre:

Biographical fiction.

Historical fiction.

Love stories.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION HORAN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West End	Book	FICTION HORAN	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK

From Nancy Horan, New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank, comes her much-anticipated second novel, which tells the improbable love story of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his tempestuous American wife, Fanny.

At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco to set sail for Belgium--with her three children and nanny in tow--to study art. It is a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life for all of them, and to pursue her own desires. Not long after her arrival, however, tragedy strikes, and Fanny and her children repair to a quiet artists' colony in France where she can recuperate. Emerging from a deep sorrow, she meets a lively Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who falls instantly in love with the earthy, independent, and opinionated "belle Americaine."

Fanny does not immediately take to the slender young lawyer who longs to devote his life to writing--and who would eventually pen such classics as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . In time, though, she succumbs to Stevenson's charms, and the two begin a fierce love affair--marked by intense joy and harrowing darkness--that spans the decades and the globe. The shared life of these two strong-willed individuals unfolds into an adventure as impassioned and unpredictable as any of Stevenson's own unforgettable tales.

Praise for Under the Wide and Starry Sky

"A richly imagined [novel] of love, laughter, pain and sacrifice . . . [Fanny Osbourne] kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson's heart." -- USA Today

"Powerful . . . flawless . . . a perfect example of what a man and a woman will do for love, and what they can accomplish when it's meant to be." -- Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Spectacular . . . an exhilarating epic about a free-spirited couple who traveled the world yet found home only in one another." -- Booklist (starred review)

"Horan's prose is gorgeous enough to keep a reader transfixed, even if the story itself weren't so compelling. I kept re-reading passages just to savor the exquisite wordplay. . . . Few writers are as masterful as she is at blending carefully researched history with the novelist's art." -- The Dallas Morning News

"A classic artistic bildungsroman and a retort to the genre, a novel that shows how love and marriage can simultaneously offer inspiration and encumbrance." --The New York Times Book Review

"Nancy Horan has done it again, capturing the entwined lives of Fanny Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson so uncannily, it reads like truth." --Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress

"Horan has a distinct knack for evoking the rich, complicated lives of long-gone artists and the women who inspired them." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Fanny and Louis are wild-hearted seekers, and Nancy Horan traces their incredible journey fearlessly, plunging us through decades, far-flung continents, and chilling brushes with death. Ambitious and often breathtaking, this sweeping story spills over with spirited, uncompromising life." --Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Horan (Loving Frank, 2007) offers another fictionalized romantic biography, this time of Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny. In 1875, 35-year-old Fanny Osbourne arrives in Europe with her three children--16-year-old Belle, 7-year-old Sammy and 3-year-old Hervey--ostensibly to study art but really to escape Sam, her perpetually unfaithful husband. After Hervey dies of tuberculosis in Paris, grieving Fanny decamps to a rural inn, where she encounters "Louis." He has been hiking the countryside alone, despite fragile health, to celebrate earning a law degree to please his father, although he plans never to practice law. For Louis, 10 years Fanny's junior, it is love at first sight. Initially, she resists--he is too boisterous and sickly--but she is eventually won over, as every reader will be, by his love of life and pure spirit as well as his genius. They live happily more or less together in Paris until Sam arrives from California and begs Fanny to reconcile. For the sake of her kids, Fanny returns to the U.S., but soon, Sam begins philandering again. Meanwhile, Louis has taken his famous donkey ride in the Cvennes, then heads to California to win Fanny back, arriving at her doorstep deathly ill from his arduous journey. Sam agrees to a divorce, and the lovers marry in 1880; Fanny is 40, Louis 29. While Louis' parents accept her as family, his literary friends, with the exception of the stalwart Henry James, consider her an American rube and are increasingly jealous of Louis' success. The Stevensons begin a life of travel: Scotland, Switzerland, France, Bournemouth, Colorado, the South Seas. Frequently bedridden, Louis is always writing, and this novel shows the germinating seeds of his classic works. While the retelling of the Stevensons' lives is rather pedestrian, Robert Louis Stevenson comes through as utterly irresistible.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.