Goodreads Blurb

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 her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

My Review: Rated 2 out of 5 stars

It is a heartbreaking story of two people who loved each other so much that they lived a destructive life. It is a story of love with an unstable writer, deceit, unfaithfulness, and backstabbing friends. I knew from the beginning that a life with Hemmingway was a disaster waiting to happen. Hadley Richarson fell hard for the narcissist writer. Hemingway couldn’t live by himself, but he also couldn’t find comfort in living with his family. I didn’t enjoy this book one bit. Men like Hemingway crush dreams of women who fall head over heels for them and leave their dreams behind to make a jerk happy. I had sympathy for Hadley, but I was also angry for her fulleshness and weakness. I couldn’t comprehend how he thought he could happily love and live with two women who were friends. His deceit was unforgiven, and Pauline was a despicable backstabbing friend. I hope this story will remind those in a similar relationship that love isn’t settling for someone who treats you less than, cheats on you and doesn’t encourage your dreams that only theirs are the priority.

Author Biography

Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times and internationally bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun and Love and Ruin. Now she introduces When the Stars Go Dark (April 13, 2021), an atmospheric novel of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is also the author of two collections of poetry, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, Town & Country, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland, Ohio.