The Paris Wife

Praise

“McLain smartly explores Hadley’s ambivalence about her role as supportive wife to a budding genius. . . . Women and book groups are going to eat up this novel.”—USA Today

“Written much in the style of Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank . . . Paula McLain’s fictional account of Hemingway’s first marriage beautifully captures the sense of despair and faint hope that pervaded the era and their marriage.”—Associated Press

“Lyrical and exhilarating . . . McLain offers a raw and fresh look at the prolific Hemingway. In this mesmerizing and helluva-good-time novel, McLain inhabits Richardson’s voice and guides us from Chicago—Richardson and Hemingway’s initial stomping ground—to the place where their life together really begins: Paris.”—Elle

“A beautiful portrait of being in Paris in the glittering 1920s—as a wife and as one’s own woman.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[Paula] McLain has brought Hadley [Hemingway] to life in a novel that begins in a rush of early love. . . . A moving portrait of a woman slighted by history, a woman whose . . . story needed to be told.”—The Boston Globe

“The Paris Wife creates the kind of out-of-body reading experience that dedicated book lovers yearn for, nearly as good as reading Hemingway for the first time—and it doesn’t get much better than that.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Exquisitely evocative . . . This absorbing, illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman, the striving writer she married, the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of. . . . McLain reinvents the story of Hadley and Ernest’s romance with the lucid grace of a practiced poet.”—The Seattle Times
 
“A novel that’s impossible to resist. It’s all here, and it all feels real.”—People