“It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts – and we wanted it all.”

Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife describes Hemingway’s earliest years as a novelist writing in Paris after WWI from the perspective of his wife, Hadley. It’s a wonderful novel, set in one of the most dynamic literary periods, where James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway were inventing the Modernist movement in bars and cafes. McLain, an accomplished poet with an MFA from Michigan, dares to evoke Hemingway’s hypnotic, infectious cadences in prose that rises to the challenge. This book belongs to the emerging genre of “speculative literature,” which blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction.

McLain, Paula. The Paris Wife. Ballantine, 2012, 72.