THE PARIS WIFE by Paula McLain

Safe to say I’ve devoured this in one sitting, it’s such a captivating and intimate story based on the actual marriage of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

Set mostly in Paris in the 1920s and told from Hadley’s perspective, it recounts their courtship, marriage and ultimately Hemingway’s affair that drove the two apart.

It feeds your curiosity of what it was like to be an aspiring writer during that time, and more specifically, dives deep into the beauty and complexities of marriage:

'People belong to each other only as long as they both believe...’

As a wife, lover, mother and muse, Hadley’s part has mostly been tirelessly supporting the man behind the words, the one and only Hemingway we’ve all come to know: “He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy”

Throughout it all, there’s a feeling of nostalgia for a time and place that is now gone, a time of street cafés, cheap strong alcohol and emotional scars of the WWI.

The special bond between the two seemed to have lasted a lifetime, in fact his last memoir before he died was a recollection of his first marriage to Hadley: 'I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her...’

“We knew what we had and what it meant, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.“