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.