Nancy Horan is best known for her 2007 novel Loving Frank, which chronicles a little-known chapter in the life of legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and his client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Loving Frank remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for over a year. It has been translated into sixteen languages, and won the 2009 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, awarded by the Society of American Historians.

Her new novel, Under the Wide and Starry Sky, explores the unlikely relationship of Robert Louis Stevenson and his spirited American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Horan aims to understand the past by interpreting and portraying the impact of real events on the lives of real people. Stevenson has been credited with a wise observation: “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” The author is interested in how her characters arrive at the banquet, and how they deal with the results of their choices.

A native Midwesterner, Nancy Horan was a teacher and journalist before turning to fiction writing. She lived for 25 years in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where she raised her two sons. She now lives with her husband on an island in Puget Sound.

Under the Wide and Starry Sky is now available as a trade paperback and eBook.

Nancy Horan on the Today Show

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