Will Swift draws on love letters and other correspondence not available to earlier biographers to depict the Nixons' marriage. Pat and Dick: The Nixons, An Intimate Portrait of a Marriage by Will Swift Threshold Editions, 496 pp.

'Warmhearted … (there's) a lot of fun to be had along the way.' Louis (as he was known) was captivated by Fanny, a beautiful, earthy, impressively competent woman a decade his senior who rolled her own cigarettes and took no guff from the men in her life, including him. Hyde, Stevenson was a struggling young essayist when he fell in love with Osbourne in 1875 at an artists' colony in France, where she had been sent to recover from the shock of losing her son to tuberculosis.

Though he would become world-famous as the author of adventure tales such as Treasure Island and the Gothic potboiler The Strange Case of Dr. In Under the Wide and Starry Sky, Horan is at it again, reimagining the real-life courtship and adventures of globe-trotting Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his indomitable American wife, Fanny Osbourne. With her best-selling 2007 novel Loving Frank - about architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his scandalous affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney - Nancy Horan didn't invent the genre of the Woman Behind the Great Artist.īut she was a guiding light for what proved to be a fresh current in literary fiction. Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan Ballantine, 472 pp. What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include the latest historical novel from Loving Frank author Nancy Horan, and a fresh look at the marriage of Pat and Richard Nixon.

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