Susan Dilks

Her Reason for Being: a Novel Susan Dilks

It is 1899. A man has been shot. His senseless death is of as little concern to us as was his equally irrelevant life. It is the shooter to whom we must turn our attention. More specifically, to the whys that led to that desperate act. But we speak now of the future, the same future which will see the rise to national prominence of the Larkin manufacturing Company and its bringing Frank Lloyd Wright to Buffalo to design not only its headquarters but the homes of many of the company's officials. Enter a world of society, music, spiritualism, the Pan American Exposition, electricty, the automobile (after the popularity of the bicycle), and the assassination of not one but two Presidents. Tragic deaths, hopeless loves, even the possibility of repressed memories of unbearable pain and horror. Fact and fiction intertwine as HRFB follows the lives and loves of two very different women over four decades as they struggle to find their place and themselves in one of the most prosperous and fastest growing cities in America. Margaret Trussler and Lizzie Knapp are strangers with seemingly nothing in common as their stories begin in 1875 . . .