Paula McLain’s historical novel retells Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s Paris marriage from Hadley’s imagined perspective.
Historical fiction
Novels that build an imagined inner life around documented people, places, and events from the past.
Historical fiction starts with a real period and uses fiction to enter the private experiences the surviving record cannot fully supply. The dates and public events may be documented, while conversations, thoughts, and many connecting scenes are invented.
That distinction matters most when a novel uses recognizable people. The result may illuminate an overlooked perspective, but it should not be treated as firsthand testimony or biography.
The Paris Wife belongs here because Paula McLain uses the known outline of Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s marriage to imagine Hadley’s experience of their Paris years. It works as a companion to A Moveable Feast precisely because it changes both the form and the point of view.
The historical fiction we recommend
A young artist rebuilds the truth about five condemned soldiers from letters, witnesses, codes, and stubborn love.
A child's false certainty separates two lovers, and a lifetime of writing cannot restore what history takes from them.
Everything the soldiers were trained not to say.
Four people shelter in a ruined Italian villa while war, love, empire, and memory keep crossing the walls.
A mother who escaped slavery faces a haunting that brings her family's buried history into the present.
Milkman Dead's search for his family's origins turns a coming-of-age story into an inquiry about inheritance and belonging.
A family moves between London and revolutionary Paris, where an old crime threatens people who tried to escape its inheritance.
Eleven short passages of Moroccan history, from a Carthaginian sailing past the coast around 500 BC to the day before yesterday.
A royal wedding at the Louvre, a massacre six days later, and two young men who try to kill each other and end up friends: Dumas's Paris of 1572.
A sailor jailed on his wedding day spends fourteen years in a fortress and the rest of the book taking Paris apart, one enemy at a time.
The last of the musketeer novels: Aramis puts a twin on the throne of France, and the four friends pay for it one by one.
Four swordsmen, a queen's twelve diamonds and a branded woman, told to Paris in daily newspaper parts in the spring of 1844.
The four musketeers at forty, split by a civil war in Paris and reunited under a scaffold in London.
An ex-convict, the policeman who will not let him go, and a quarter of a million words on why France was built to produce both.
Hugo's French title names the cathedral, not the bell-ringer. The book is about the building, and it saved it.
Hugo's exile novel: one fisherman, one wrecked steam engine on a reef, and the octopus chapter that gave French a new word.
Arthur Miller read the 1692 Salem court records, changed four things in them, and wrote the play that a congressional committee later made him answer for.
Puck brings back the dead of English history to talk to two children in Sussex, and between two of their stories sits "If—".
A love story set in Newport after the Revolution, written in grief after Stowe's son drowned, with a real minister who preached against the slave trade.
Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction: a novella about Madison Washington, who led nineteen enslaved men in taking over the slave ship Creole in 1841.
Margaret Atwood's novel about Grace Marks, a real Irish servant girl convicted of murder in Canada in 1843, who says she cannot remember the day it happened.
Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize winner: an old woman in a small Canadian town finally tells the truth about her sister, who drove off a bridge in 1945.
A Hartford factory boss wakes up near Camelot in the year 528, fakes a miracle with an eclipse, and tries to bring the nineteenth century to King Arthur's England.
A beggar boy and the Prince of Wales swap clothes for a joke, and a palace guard throws the real prince out into the streets of Tudor London.
Mary Shelley's second novel: a real fourteenth-century tyrant of Lucca, and the two invented women who love him and refuse to be ruled by him.
Two families in California's Salinas Valley, one of them Steinbeck's own, act out the story of Cain and Abel across three generations.
Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel about a telegraph clerk who loses the girl he loves to a doctor, and waits more than half a century to tell her again.
Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 novel follows seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, the invented town they found, from its first sight of ice to its last day.
Three young Russians grow up while Napoleon's armies march from Austerlitz to a burning Moscow and back out again.
A village carpenter loves a pretty dairymaid who has been seduced by the squire's heir, and the secret ends in a prison cell.
An American captain spends a day aboard a drifting Spanish slave ship and fails to see that the enslaved people have taken it over.
A well-loved young sailor on a British warship is falsely accused of plotting mutiny, and answers with a single blow.
A clever young woman marries a dry old scholar, an ambitious young doctor marries the prettiest girl in town, and a Midlands town watches both go wrong.
A woman in Puritan Boston is sentenced to wear a red letter A for life, and refuses to name her child's father.
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