Love and Ruin
Paula McLain's Love and Ruin is a biographical novel about Martha Gellhorn, one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth century, told in McLain's familiar first person voice from the same world she opened with The Paris Wife. Martha meets the much older Ernest Hemingway in a Key West bar in 1936, when she is a hungry twenty seven year old aspiring novelist and he is the most famous male writer of his generation. Their courtship begins on the war torn front lines of the Spanish Civil War, where Martha files dispatches that establish her as a serious journalist in her own right, and the affair eventually leads to marriage and an aging finca outside Havana. McLain traces the slow collision between Hemingway's need to be the only writer in the room and Martha's refusal to be reduced to a wife, charting her coverage of the Normandy landings, her eventual escape from the marriage, and her decades of independent reporting that followed.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Paula McLain
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What you might want to know about Love and Ruin
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Twenty-something Martha Gellhorn meets Ernest Hemingway in a Florida bar in 1936 and follows him into reporting the Spanish Civil War. The novel walks through their marriage and her own career, which kept growing past his.
Yes. Love and Ruin is fictionalized history of Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent who was Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Paula McLain previously wrote The Paris Wife about Hemingway's first wife Hadley.
No. The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin are independent novels about different Hemingway wives. Either can be read first. Together they form a thematic pair without being a series.
Love and Ruin was written by Paula McLain, published in 2018 by Fleet.
Love and Ruin is 231 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Love and Ruin takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Love and Ruin is a standalone novel by Paula McLain, not part of a series.
Love and Ruin is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.