Imagine living in the shadow of your famous husband and of the other women in his life.
Being married to an acclaimed author may sound like a dream for many, but in Mrs Hemingway, English author Naomi Wood's novel about Ernest Hemingway's four wives, life is far from straightforward.
Hadley is the first to wed Hemingway, then a young journalist. She has a simple life with him in Paris - until her friend and magazine writer Fife becomes her husband's lover.
"Though they know they are all miserable, no one is willing to sound the first retreat: not wife, not husband, not mistress," says Hadley, reflecting on the strange turn her marriage has taken.
After Fife, there's Martha, who hates how her husband's fame surpasses her own achievements.
Wife No 4 is the free-spirited Mary, destined to be the last person to see Hemingway alive.
Through her fictional accounts of real people, Wood explores what it was like to be in love with one of the most famous writers of his time.
But Hemingway is not a villain, and his wives are not merely victims.
Love hurts everyone in this novel, threatening to derail Ernest's writing ambitions as well as the lives of those who love him.
It's not the first novel about Hemingway's women. The New York Times 2011 bestseller The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, provided an intimate view of Hadley, the only Mrs Hemingway who wasn't a journalist.
But Wood's book goes further, weaving the lives of four very different women into one complicated love story.
Wood's extensive research in British and American university libraries, as well as in Hemingway's heritage homes in Chicago, Florida and Cuba, gives readers an intimate glimpse of the private man behind the public accolades.
* Mrs Hemingway, by Naomi Wood, is published by Pan Macmillan Australia in March 2014 (RRP $29.99).
