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    Beautiful Exiles
    Beautiful Exiles
    Beautiful Exiles
    Audiobook10 hours

    Beautiful Exiles

    Written by Meg Waite Clayton

    Narrated by Kirsten Potter

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From New York Times bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton comes a riveting novel based on one of the most volatile and intoxicating real-life love affairs of the twentieth century.

    Key West, 1936. Headstrong, accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship—forged over writing, talk, and family dinners—flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they’re covering the Spanish Civil War.

    Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha—her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They’re made for each other.

    With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world’s foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beautiful Exiles is a stirring story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman—ahead of her time—claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateAug 1, 2018
    ISBN9781543674835
    Beautiful Exiles
    Author

    Meg Waite Clayton

    Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Postmistress of Paris (a Publisher’s Weekly notable book; HarperCollins, Nov. 30, 2021), the National Jewish Book Award finalist and international bestseller The Last Train to London, the Langum Award honoree The Race for Paris, the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, and The Wednesday Sisters, an Entertainment Weekly 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. Her novels have been published in 23 languages. She has also written more than 100 essays, opinions, and reviews for major newspapers, magazines, and public radio. She mentors in the OpEd Project, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the California bar. megwaiteclayton.com

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    Reviews for Beautiful Exiles

    3.5/5

    40 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Blah blah Hemingway blah blah Martha poor girl didn’t know what she was getting into
    • 2/5
      Bored. DNF
    • 4/5
      Martha Gelhorn is the protagonist of this work of historical fiction. I knew her only as Mrs. Ernest Hemingway but she was so much more; she was intelligent, fearless and compassionate. Her reporting of several wars during the 20th-century was groundbreaking for a woman. Her passion for her writing and the people she reported upon made her life with her narcissistic husband impossible. After reading this book, my distaste for Hemingway the man grew even though he was mentally ill and a drunk.Hemingway wished Martha to be at his beck and call rather than her reporting work away from him. His works are classic but he was a cad. Reading parts of this book made me want to step into the pages and slap him across the face. How could any husband treat his wife in the manner he did to her and his first wife Hadley. If you are a lover of a book with a strong female lead, please read this book to discover a female pioneer in reporting from a war zone.
    • 4/5
      I will never claim to have a great literary knowledge and this book just proves it. Ernest Hemingway is a well-known author and I am pretty unfamiliar with his work. I am not familiar at all with his history and have no knowledge of his personal life. So when I picked up Beautiful Exiles I was entirely unsure what I was going to be reading. While I still will not claim to be a know it all about Hemingway I will say that I had my eyes opened as to how selfish, demanding, and drunken he is. I was amazed at how he treated those around him and how he thought he was a big gun (which he was in his time) so therefore he deserved special privilege. The part of the story that stuck with me was when he took Martha’s press privileges away by claiming them as his own and then not being able to get to the front lines and tell the real story. I found this book to be a slow read but enthralling read. I was invested in Martha’s story. I was invested in the era. And I was invested in knowing how it would all end for her. The settings were shared in such detail I could picture the different cities, I could see how the world had changed due to the war, and I could feel the emotion that was felt while visiting them. I enjoyed that some of the cities were visited pre-war and then revisited after the war had hit them or while the war had was going on and you could feel the difference in the people, the city, and the feelings. Beautiful Exiles is an amazing, eye-opening, heart string pulling story. I am excited to be sharing it and am looking forward to reading more of Meg Waite Clayton’s book.
    • 4/5
      My knowledge of Hemingway runs no farther than The Old Man and the Sea, a staple of most high school English classes. I only have a vague memory of slogging thru, his writing clearly not for me. As a result, I've never pursued any more reading, let alone research, on him (or his wives) and therefore honestly had no frame of reference going into Beautiful Exiles, other than having read Meg Waite Clayton's previous books and being a fan of her writing.Painstakingly researched and beautifully written, this book is not about Hemingway; instead it is about Martha Gellhorn, a writer and eventual prominent war correspondent, who became Hemingway's third wife. Told in the first-person, Gelhorn proves to be just as strong-willed as Hemingway, and more often than not, I found myself wishing she would strike out on her own and leave the self-inflated Hemingway behind. We are given a Gelhorn who is a force unto herself, who is not overshadowed by the sometimes more famous characters around her.The writing is spot on; whether describing the peaceful, lazy days in Key West or the fast paced, immediate action of being on the front line, I could easily imagine each scene. The detail and descriptions were perfect and really brought the characters, and their situations, to life. Clayton's writing continues to get stronger with each book, and it clearly shows here.In my admitted non-existent knowledge of Martha Gelhorn, I appreciate Beautiful Exiles all the more; everyone knows Hemingway, but I'm not so sure about Gelhorn. Clayton has given me a perspective on a woman ahead of her time, who was willing to put her life on the line to make sure the world knew what was happening in Europe during Hitler's rise to power. I found Gelhorn fascinating and am sorry that she had become overshadowed by Hemingway, at least in my experience. I want to find out more about her, and I think that a book like Beautiful Exiles, one that sparks that kind of interest in me, is always remarkable.
    • 4/5
      I first read about Martha Gelhorn in the notes from this author's book Race for Paris. I was intrigued with her bravery and her goal to be one of the first women writers in France after the Normandy invasion. She was a feminist before her time. Reading this book made me want to learn more about her and her life after WWII and I found her to be a very interesting woman. Thanks to Meg Waite Clayton for her deep research into a small time period of this interesting woman's life.Martha Gelhorn first met Ernest Hemingway in a bar in Key West in 1936. They became friends and traveled to Spain together to cover the Spanish Civil War. I was amazed at how close they got to the fighting in the war, often sharing a fox hole with soldiers to avoid bombs. It was a gritty and exciting time for both of them and they soon became more than friends even though he was still married. As they traveled around the world together looking for more excitement - Spain, Italy, China and Cuba, their love for each other grew as much as their dislike for each other. Hemingway admired her for her bravery but wanted to keep her in a little box as his wife without realizing that she would lose what first attracted him to her. She wanted to live life to the fullest and not be tied down to being a wife. With these two opposing views, it's amazing that they stayed together as long as they did. I enjoyed this look at Martha Gelhorn's life - both personal and professional. She was brave and caring and influenced many people with her reporting. Thanks to the author for this intimate portrait.Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.