The Paris Wife

1920s in Chicago: When peaceful twenty-eight-year-old Hadley Richardson meets Ernest Hemingway, her life is drastically altered. Before that, she had all but given up on happiness and love. After a fast-paced courtship and marriage, the couple sailed to Paris, where they settled into a vibrant and turbulent social circle known as the "Lost Generation," which also included F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. There, they became the ideal couple.

The Hemingways, despite their intense love, are unprepared for the fast-paced, heavy-drinking lifestyle of Jazz Age Paris, which places little emphasis on conventional ideas of monogamy and family. Ernest, surrounded by alluring ladies and rival egos, tries to find the voice that would make him famous while putting all the depth and complexity of his friendships with Hadley and their group of friends into the book that will eventually become The Sun Also Rises. While the obligations of living with Ernest become more expensive and her jobs as wife, friend, and muse more difficult, Hadley tries to maintain her sense of self. Even though they have a very strong link, they finally face the marriage's worst crisis—a deceit that will cause everything they've worked so hard to achieve to come apart.

The Paris Wife is a devastating depiction of love and strained fidelity, made all the more poignant by the knowledge that Hemingway ultimately said he would have preferred to die than to fall in love with anyone other than Hadley.