Hemingway in Love: His Own Story

'A tender and devastating portrait' Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

In June 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke - a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his life. Their final conversation was also the final instalment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over more than a decade.

To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife Mary, also a close friend, Hotch has held back, keeping these conversations to himself for half a century. Now, for the first time, he reveals the truth of Hemingway's romantic life in Paris, the affair that destroyed his first marriage, and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. This is Hemingway as you've never known him - humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.

Moving and intimate, Hemingway in Love is the repentantly candid chapter missing from the definitive biography of a literary giant.

'This confessional of love not lost but thrown away adds fascinating details . . . but it is the tone of intimate, sorrowful humility in place of boastfulness that moves most' Guardian