Don't get me wrong. A Moveable Feast is a terrific book, one of Ernest Hemingway's best. It's a brilliant look at a place and time and a community of expats, a memoir including the artists and intellectuals and lost souls of Paris in the 1920s.

That being said, The Paris Wife is a pretty intriguing look at the same time and place, a novel from the perspective of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first (of four) wives. It's a work of fiction, but meticulously researched, and aligned with the historical facts. I wouldn't recommend it on its own necessarily but rather as a feminist counterpoint, a book in conversation with its predecessors. Hemingway (here as elsewhere) is portrayed as complicated, flawed, sometimes sympathetic, a very poor husband, and very, very damaged--at times weak, at times cruel, much like many of his famous characters. Hadley here is good and true and loving, quickly out of her depth, and fatally passive. She was left out of the story in The Sun Also Rises, but she's very much present in A Moveable Feast, and gets an apology there, many years after the fact. (Hemingway also gave her the rights to The Sun Also Rises in the divorce, and she received royalties from the novel, and the 1957 film.) Not knowing much about Hadley ("the Paris wife") before I read this novel, I was pleased to learn that she had a happy and long life out of the spotlight after their marriage dissolved; sadly, we all know her first husband's fate.

Her story is worth knowing and The Paris Wife is worth reading. It doesn't eclipse the original--rather, a different frame of reference enhances it.

NOVEL: The Paris Wife

AUTHOR: Paula McClain

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2011

IMAGE: book cover, Ballantine Books