The Secret Lives of the Hemingway Wives, The British Library

Ernest Hemingway is canonised in American literature as the author of some of the country’s finest works. He blazed a trail with novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 and his lean, spare way with words hugely influenced other twentieth-century writers. His personal life, however, was rather more chequered.

After years of suffering physical and mental health problems, he committed suicide in 1961. But he was a man who lived large. He married four women over the forty years before his death – four fascinating women who were tested to their limits by their love for him.

Naomi Wood tells the stories of these women in her new novel Mrs Hemingway, taking the reader from Roaring Twenties Paris to Cold War America, via a bumpy road of passion and infidelity. At The British Library, Wood will be reading from the book before going on to explore these women’s lives with Hemingway through archive photos, video footage and personal accounts. An intimate window on private – and public – lives.