The Paris Wife

He tells me his name is Ernest.
“I’m thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?
What do you think? Should I toss it out?”
“Maybe not just yet. You never know.
A name like that could catch on.”

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 and finds herself captivated by his energy, intensity and literary ambition. 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, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

But Jazz Age Paris – febrile, glamorous, its inhabitants running headlong from the shadow of the Great War – does not lend itself to family life and fidelity.

As Hadley, now mother to a beloved baby son, struggles with jealousy and self-doubt, Ernest’s ferocious literary endeavours begin to bear fruit, and they face 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’.

A searing novel of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unfortgettable people.