A Study Guide for William Nicholson's "Shadowlands," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

Jack Lewis is smug in his convictions about God and His plan for the world until Joy and her young son enter his life and the bewildered theoretician of love in the abstract finally confronts its direct presence.

Seventeen-year-olds Maddy Fisher and Rich Ross yearn for love, and after their first attempts at relationships go awry, they find one another and form a deep bond that can only be expressed one way.

From an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, “a wonderfully smooth, sinuous, enigmatic, and sexy tale of two love affairs” (Providence Journal) set in Amherst and illuminated by the presence of Emily Dickinson. Alice Dickinson, a young advertising executive in London, decides to take time off work to research her idea for a screenplay: the true story of the scandalous, adulterous love affair between Emily Dickinson’s married brother, Austin, and a young, Amherst College faculty wife named Mabel Loomis Todd. Austin, twenty-four years Mabel’s senior and the college treasurer, lived next door to his reclusive sister, who allowed her home to be used for Austin and Mabel’s trysts. Alice travels to Amherst, staying in the house of Nick Crocker, a married English academic in his fifties. As Alice researches Austin and Mabel’s story and Emily’s role in their affair, she embarks on her own affair with Nick, an affair that, of course, they both know echoes the one that she’s writing about. Using the poems of Emily Dickinson throughout, historically accurate and meticulously recreated from their voluminous letters and diaries, “William Nicholson deftly weaves Mabel’s story with Alice’s, shedding light on the timeless longing, lust, and loneliness of love” (People). Amherst is a provocative and remarkable novel: “The poetry and history go down easy, the lovers fall hard, and the tragic, treacherous terrain of romantic entanglement is well explored” (Elle).

How well do we know the people we marry? Is it wrong to decide it’s time to be honest? Is love enough to save a family? In The Retreat from Moscow, William Nicholson, the celebrated author of Shadowlands, tells the powerful story of a husband who decides to be truthful in his marriage, and of the wife and son whose lives will never be the same again. Edward and Alice have been married for thirty-three years. He is a teacher at a boys school, perfectly at home with his daily crossword and lately engrossed in reading about Napoleon’s costly invasion of Moscow. She is an observant Catholic, exacting and opinionated, and has been collecting poems about lost love for a new anthology. Jamie, their diffident thirty-two year old son, is visiting for the weekend when Edward announces he has met another woman. With the coiled intensity of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and the embracing empathy of Edward Albee’s best family dramas, The Retreat from Moscow shines a breathtakingly natural light on the fallout of a shattered marriage.

The safe haven of the Noble Warriors has been demolished and the Nomana have disbanded. When a young boy preaching peace and joy mesmerizes all who come in contact with him, a large following grows quickly--one that soon includes Morning Star and the Wildman. Yet Seeker, who is obsessed with his increasingly perilous journey to kill the last savanter, finds his mission placing him at odds with this new leader. As loyalties and friendships and faith are tested, all three heroes must question: Who can be trusted? And what can be believed?