Paula McLain has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 53 ratings. The most-rated is The Paris Wife.
The Paris Wife
Summary
A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet 28-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold onto her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for. A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
©2011 Paula Mclain (P)2011 Random House
Circling the Sun
Summary
Paula McLain, author of the phenomenal best seller The Paris Wife, now returns with her keenly anticipated new novel, transporting listeners to colonial Kenya in the 1920s. Circling the Sun brings to life a fearless and captivating woman - Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, author of the classic memoir Out of Africa. Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe, who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature's delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships. Beryl forges her own path as a horse trainer, and her uncommon style attracts the eye of the Happy Valley set, a decadent, bohemian community of European expats who also live and love by their own set of rules. But it's the ruggedly charismatic Denys Finch Hatton who ultimately helps Beryl navigate the uncharted territory of her own heart. The intensity of their love reveals Beryl's truest self and her fate: to fly. Set against the majestic landscape of early 20th-century Africa, McLain's powerful tale reveals the extraordinary adventures of a woman before her time, the exhilaration of freedom and its cost, and the tenacity of the human spirit.
©2015 Paula McLain (P)2015 Random House Audio
Love and Ruin
Summary
New York Times best seller. The best-selling author of The Paris Wife returns to the subject of Ernest Hemingway in a novel about his passionate, stormy marriage to Martha Gellhorn - a fiercely independent, ambitious woman ahead of her time who would become one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Bloomberg, and Real Simple. In 1937, 28-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It's her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. There she also finds herself unexpectedly - and unwillingly - falling in love with Ernest Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend. On the eve of World War II, and set against the turbulent backdrops of Madrid and Cuba, Martha and Ernest's relationship and careers ignite. But when Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they are no longer equals, and Martha must forge a path as her own woman and writer. Heralded by Ann Patchett as “the new star of historical fiction”, Paula McLain brings Gellhorn’s story richly to life and captures her as a heroine for the ages: a woman who will risk absolutely everything to find her own voice. Praise for Love and Ruin: “In this heart-tugging follow-up [to The Paris Wife], we meet Martha Gellhorn, a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, who was the third - and perhaps most intriguing - of [Hemingway's] wives. The title says it all.” (People) “Propulsive...highly engaging.... McLain does an excellent job portraying a woman with dreams who isn’t afraid to make them real.... Her work around the world...is presented in meticulous, hair-raising passages.... The book is fueled by her questing spirit, which asks, Why must a woman decide between being a war correspondent and a wife in her husband’s bed?” (The New York Times Book Review) “[The] scenes of professional rivalry and seesawing imbalance are some of McLain’s best.... McLain’s legions of fans will relish the inspiration of a gutsy woman who discovers she doesn’t need a man at her side, after all.” (The Boston Globe)
©2018 Paula McLain (P)2018 Random House Audio
Something That Cannot Die
Summary
A powerful and revealing story about Georgia O’Keeffe, torn between the city that made her and the desert that promises to set her free, written by Paula McLain, the New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Wife and the forthcoming When the Stars Go Dark, and performed by Emmy Award-winning actress Cynthia Nixon. It’s 1929 in New York City. In an apartment high above Lexington Avenue, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe feels stuck. At 42, she should be at the apex of her powers as an artist, and yet something is missing. Her husband - the gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who helped build her reputation in the art world - has grown needy and insecure, not to mention unfaithful. More than this, her work has lost its fire, and she knows it. The calla lilies and poppies for which she is revered now seem careful, predictable. Feeling desperate and conflicted, Georgia flees to New Mexico in search of something that will ignite her once again. There, she meets an adventurous young woman whose energy and optimism take hold of Georgia and show her a glimpse of what another kind of life - one of her own making - might look like. Set against the transcendent desert landscapes of New Mexico, and brought to life by a beloved voice and contemporary master of historical fiction, Something That Cannot Die is an intimate portrait of a great artist and the adventures - both physical and spiritual - that moved and changed her.
©2020 Paula McLain (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
When the Stars Go Dark
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Wife comes an atmospheric novel of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense: A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal? “A powerhouse of a novel that is guaranteed to keep the reader up all night.” (Kristin Hannah, author of The Four Winds) Anna Hart is a seasoned missing-persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns that a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna's childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with saving the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in. Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives - and our faith in one another.
©2021 Paula McLain (P)2021 Random House Audio
Like Family
Summary
This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. McLain's beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.
©2003 Paula McLain (P)2018 Tantor