The Oak Lovers

The Oak Lovers, a fictionalized account of the lives of the author’s great-grandparents, is a bittersweet tale of obsession, sacrifice, and redemption that would appeal to readers of biographical fiction such as Loving Frank, Z and The Paris Wife.

Summer, 1900 - Eighteen-year-old Martha Niles flees her morally rigid home for Roycroft, the renowned bohemian art colony near Buffalo, New York. Everyone who is anyone in the arts visits there, and in a place where women work and play alongside the men, every day brings Martha the chance to meet influential people who might advance her career.

Gifted and ambitious, Martha soon has the opportunity to work beside acclaimed landscape painter Carl Ahrens, who is afflicted with a debilitating illness, and her art flourishes in the presence of a mentor who insists she’s his equal. She affects his work, too: the trees he once depicted in his paintings as solitary, grieving figures, now dance and embrace on carpets of moss and shadows. Martha and Carl’s connection grows, though he is thirty-eight, married, and dying.

As scandal threatens to overtake them, Martha learns that Carl is being denied needed medical care because of his wife’s staunch religious beliefs. Martha must choose between saving the life or the legacy of the man she loves.

Will following her heart mean sacrificing her own artistic aspirations to live in the shadow of a master, or can she forge a path to fame for them both?