From New York Times bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton comes a riveting novel based on one of the most volatile and intoxicating real-life love affairs of the twentieth century.
Key West, 1936. Headstrong, accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship—forged over writing, talk, and family dinners—flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they’re covering the Spanish Civil War.
Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha—her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They’re made for each other.
With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world’s foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beautiful Exiles is a stirring story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman—ahead of her time—claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love.
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In her sixth novel, Beautiful Exiles, Meg Waite Clayton continues to investigate—and inhabit—the lives and fortunes of women who ripped open the envelope of their eras’ social and cultural limitations. This time, Clayton dives into the mind and heart of prolific, outspoken journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), a war correspondent who also happened to become Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. [Beautiful Exiles] is an immensely ambitious undertaking…[A] love-sex-booze-intrigue-politics-war-literary culture-travel-packed saga…serv[ing] up micro and macro: intimate words and sensuous moments set against the world’s strife.
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San Francisco Chronicle