FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Michael Collins, the protagonist in David Adams Cleveland’s latest novel, LOVE’S ATTRACTION (Winsted Press: July 2013; $24.95), has been obsessed with Thoreau and Concord since he read Walden as a young teenager growing up in nearby blue-collar Lowell. His obsession led him to a scholarship at Concord’s prestigious Emerson Academy and his mother a waitressing job at the Concord Inn. Later it brought him back to Concord in search—not just for the lost love of his schooldays, but for clues to the life of his great-great-grandfather, one James Collins, the itinerant Irish laborer who had a shanty along the tracks of the Fitchburg railway, from whom Thoreau bought the planks to build his shack at Walden Pond. Michael is haunted by Thoreau’s poignant description of the destitute James Collins and his wife disappearing down the road with all their worldly possessions carried on their backs.
From literary Concord to the backwater canals of Venice, LOVE’S ATTRACTION takes readers on a tantalizing and thought-provoking journey as Michael Collins, a Washington political fixer facing an impending bribery scandal, is suddenly confronted with a past he never knew and a legacy of heartbreak and deception from which he failed to escape.
LOVE’S ATTRACTION is a mysterious, romantic novel that explores universal themes of identity: how memory, talent and intemperate desires—embodied in art as well as in our genes—are passed down through families to influence our hidden selves. The novel speaks to the role of metamorphosis in our lives and how the transforming elixir of love’s attraction makes us most fully human.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Adams Cleveland is a novelist and art historian. His first novel, With a Gemlike Flame, drew wide praise for its evocation of Venice and the hunt for a lost masterpiece by Raphael. His most recent art history book, A History of American Tonalism, won the Silver Medal in Art History in the Book of the Year Awards, 2010; and Outstanding Academic Title 2011 from the American Library Association; it was the bestselling American art history book in 2011 and 2012. He and his wife live in New York where he works as an art advisor with his son, Carter Cleveland, founder of Artsy.net, the new internet site making all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an internet connection.