Love and Ruin by Paula McLain

Although my personal favorite by this author is her novel called Circling the Sun about aviatrix Beryl Markham, LOVE AND RUIN by Paula McLain is another great work of historical fiction featuring a strong woman. Here, McLain has returned to exploring the life of a wife of Ernest Hemingway. Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, was a well-known war correspondent in her own right who landed with the troops at Omaha Beach. A decade apart in age, Hemingway and Gellhorn meet in Key West in 1936, carry on a romance in Spain during that Civil War, marry and move to Cuba in the early 1940s, and ultimately deal with the tension between Gellhorn’s pursuit of her own career versus support of her husband’s: “How, how, how can it work? … You’re the sun and I’m the moon. You’re iron and I’m steel.  We can’t bend and we can’t change.” McLain, as always, does an excellent job with both inner dialogue and descriptive prose conjuring the time period and the novel’s various settings. LOVE AND RUIN is likely to be very popular with book groups. It was chosen as a LibraryReads Selection for May and received starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal. Add this to your summer reading list!