At the age of 35, 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. Not long after her arrival, 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 Robert Louis Stevenson, and the two begin a fierce love affair that spans the decades and the globe.

From Nancy Horan, the 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.

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 35, 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, 10 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.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ORPHAN TRAIN comes a novel of love, risk and self-discovery.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ORPHAN TRAIN comes a novel of love, risk and self-discovery.

Angela can feel the clock ticking. She is single in New York City, stuck in a job she doesn’t want and a life that seems to have, somehow, just happened. She inherited a flair for Italian cooking from her grandmother, but she never seems to have the time for it --- these days, her oven holds only sweaters. Tacked to her office bulletin board is a photo from a magazine of a tidy cottage on the coast of Maine --- a charming reminder of a life that could be hers, if she could only muster the courage to go after it.

On a hope and a chance, Angela decides to pack it all up and move to Maine, finding the nudge she needs in the dating profile of a handsome sailor who loves dogs and Italian food. But her new home isn’t quite matching up with the fantasy. Far from everything familiar, Angela begins to rebuild her life from the ground up. Working at a local coffeehouse, she begins to discover the pleasures and secrets of her new small-town community and, in the process, realizes there’s really no such thing as the way life should be.

WE ARE NOT OURSELVES is the sprawling story of Eileen and Ed Leary, a wife and husband drawn apart and together again by their complicated relationship with the American Dream.

WE ARE NOT OURSELVES is the sprawling story of Eileen and Ed Leary, a wife and husband drawn apart and together again by their complicated relationship with the American Dream.

Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.

When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream.

Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.