Books

Women and Wild Savages

Blending fact and fiction, history and romance, Women and Wild Savages tells the tragic yet empowering story of Lina Loos’s struggle for love, liberation, and selfhood during her turbulent marriage to the renowned architect Adolf Loos. Set in early 1900s fin-de-siècle Vienna, it is a timeless tale of one woman’s journey to be herself in a world determined to make her someone else.

At eighteen, Lina is an aspiring actress and the striking daughter of Viennese coffeehouse owners. When Vienna’s most sought-after bachelor, architect Adolf Loos, unexpectedly proposes, she eagerly says yes. But the honeymoon is short-lived. Though her “modern” husband counts women activists among his friends, his progressive ideals don’t extend behind closed doors—certainly not to his young wife.

Thank goodness for the sympathetic ear of Café Central’s beloved old poet, Peter Altenberg. But when Loos’s emotional distance pushes Lina toward the charming son of his activist friend, she finds herself entangled in a web of desire, jealousy, and betrayal. No man’s love, she learns, is unconditional.

As these three men compete to shape her into the perfect wife, muse, or lover, Lina must fight to reclaim the woman she once imagined herself becoming.