The Paris Wife

Présentation de l'éditeur Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they soon fall in with a circle of lively and volatile expatriates, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Ernest and Hadley are thrust into a life of artistic ambition, hard liquor and spur-of-the-moment dashes to Pamplona, the Riviera and the Swiss Alps. But Jazz Age Paris does not lend itself to family life and fidelity. As Hadley struggles with jealousy and self-doubt, Ernest's ferocious literary endeavours begin to bear fruit, and the couple faces the ultimate crisis of their marriage - a deception that will lead to the unravelling of everything they made for themselves in Paris, their 'great good place'. Revue de presse 'I read it in two days, laughing and crying. What a heartbreaker . . . It has all the ingredients of a literary heart-thumper: sex, love, ambition, betrayal, impossibility and regret . . . McLain has given the voice, mind, pen and strength to a woman. Hadley is an intelligent, strong, adult woman in a deeply unsympathetic situation - glittering, but toxic and ultimately very undermining. It's a very haunting combination' --Bidisha 'This Hemingway and this Paris, as imagined by Paula McLain, ring so true that I felt as if I was eavesdropping . . . As seen by the sure and steady eye of his first wife, Hadley, here is the spectacle of the man becoming the legend set against the bright jazzed heat of Paris in the twenties. As much about life and how we try to catch it as it is about love even as it vanishes, this is an utterly absorbing novel' --Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress 'The Paris Wife is mesmerizing. Hadley Hemingway's voice, lean and lyrical, kept me in my seat, unable to take my eyes and ears away from these young lovers. Paula McLain is a first-rate writer who creates a world you don't want to leave. I loved this book' --Nancy Horan, author of LOVING FRANK Biographie de l'auteur Paula McLain received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of two collections of poetry, as well as a memoir, Like Family, and a novel, A Ticket to Ride. She lives in Cleveland with her family.