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Ex-Wife (Faber Editions)

Ursula Parrott

‘A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.’ (Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually).

Format
Ebook
ISBN
9780571388066
Date Published
30.07.2024
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.
Summary

‘A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.’ (Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually).

I was floored: truly brilliant.’ (Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss)

It feels remarkable to be a deserted wife when one is only twenty-four.

New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in ‘Love-Outside-Marriage’. 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: as an ex-wife.

A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the ‘era of the one-night stand’. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.

Critic Reviews

I was floored by this book: truly brilliant.

Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss
Critic Reviews

A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life ... As relevant, moving, and scathing today.

Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually
Critic Reviews

Supernatural gifts of insight as well as a talent for acid aphorisms and peppery dialogue .. You might as well split the price of a copy between five pals because this book is bound to end up in friend-circulation.

New York Times
Critic Reviews

Bridget Jones in the Jazz Age . . . Ex-Wife is funny, lively and sometimes harrowing, engaging with its own contemporary culture in a way novels rarely do . . . Now, a century on from her first success, it’s cause for celebration that she can be read once more.

Observer
Critic Reviews

I love this novel so much . . . I can’t understand how it’s not a classic we’ve known and read all our lives.

Polly Samson, author of Theatre of Dreamers
Critic Reviews

A smoke-filled and scotch-soaked story of New York. Patricia is a wise cracking heroine who then intensifies into something beautiful and tragic.

Sheena Patel, author of I'm a Fan
UrsulaParrott

Ursula Parrott (1899–1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of twenty books and over one hundred stories and articles. Born in Boston, she attended Radcliffe College and moved to Greenwich Village after marrying journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott. Their 1926 divorce inspired her at first anonymous debut, Ex-Wife, which sold over 100,000 copies in 1929 and was adapted into Hollywood sensation…

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