Faber acquires Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
By Faber Editor, 10 October 2023
Faber has acquired ‘next summer’s hottest rediscovered classic: the ultimate millennial novel from a century ago’.
Following a young divorcée losing and finding herself in New York, Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife was a bestselling phenomenon on publication in 1929, selling over 100,000 copies before disappearing – until now. Introduced by Monica Heisey, author of Really Good Actually, this ‘utterly contemporary gem’ will be resurrected in Faber Editions in August 2024.
Head of Classics & Heritage Ella Griffiths acquired World All Languages rights – excluding USA – from McNally Jackson. Faber have since accepted four pre-empts in a flurry of interest from Fischer in Germany, Feltrinelli Gramma in Italy, Atlas Contact in the Netherlands and Wahlström & Widstrand in Sweden. Spanish rights have also been sold to Gatopardo. (For translation enquiries, please contact [email protected]).
In Ex-Wife, Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in’Love-Outside-Marriage within the Honesty Policy’. Until they don’t. Or, really, until he doesn’t. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman in 1924: as an ex-wife.
Griffiths said:
‘I can’t believe this sensational novel is almost a hundred years old. What a voice: devastatingly tragicomic, achingly confessional, Patricia was instantly my friend. Her deadpan wisecracks – rich in wit and wisdom – mask the pain of heartbreak as she navigates Manhattan’s nightlife, friendships, abortion clinics and office politics to forge new freedoms in a patriarchal world. Ex-Wife flushes you with the hedonistic buzz of an absinthe cocktail with an emotional hangover that hits hard, and I can’t wait for a new era to fall in love.’
Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of over twenty novels and fifty stories. Born in Boston, she attended Radcliffe College before moving to Greenwich Village and becoming a newspaper reporter. After marrying fellow journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott, their 1926 divorce inspired her anonymous debut, Ex-Wife. It was adapted into Hollywood sensation The Divorcee at the height of the Depression, and Parrott became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, adapting her bestsellers for the screen with stars like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart. After her popularity declined, amidst various high-profile court cases, Parrott eventually died of cancer in a charity ward in New York.
