The Oak Lovers

Summer, 1900 - Eighteen-year-old Martha Niles flees her morally rigid home for Roycroft, a bohemian art colony near Buffalo, New York. Gifted and ambitious, she soon has the opportunity to work beside acclaimed landscape painter, Carl Ahrens, and her art flourishes in the presence of a mentor who insists she’s his equal. While Carl shares the secret of painting fickle light, Martha infuses color and movement into his work. As they grow closer, his trees, once solitary, grieving figures, now laugh and dance together. It is their story, she comes to realize, the one they might have lived if he weren’t already married. If he weren’t dying.
 

As scandal threatens to overtake the couple and Carl is denied medical treatment by his Christian Scientist wife, 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?

Based on the true story of Bullock's great-grandparents, THE OAK LOVERS is a story of obsession, sacrifice, and redemption that would appeal to readers of Alyson Richman, Brunonia Barry, Cathy Marie Buchanan, and Stephanie Cowell.