Ex-wife

Description

‘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
‘A devastating, wryly funny and shockingly modern novel’ Pandora Sykes
‘Bridget Jones in the Jazz Age . . . A century on, it’s cause for celebration.’ Observer

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.