The Paris Pilgrims - Tapa dura

Mixing biography with fiction to often startling revelatory effect, this novel entangles its hero -- a brash, callow Hemingway -- intimately in the lives of the artists who haunted bohemian Paris in the 1920s. They also tell his story. For this Hemingway is known by the company he keeps: by the painter Mike Strater, a man he admires and woefully betrays; by the "ambisexual" Robert McAlmon, whose marriage to an English heiress hides a host of gender-bent secrets; by a sympathetic Sylvia Beach, a resentful Alice B. Toklas, a bemused Nora Joyce; and especially by his pretty, boyish wife, Hadley, who speaks for the husband she adores, the writer she respects, the man she strives desperately not only to please but also to comprehend.

Here is Hemingway the war correspondent, the sportsman, the bullfight aficionado, the eminent artist being enigmatically born. Here, too, is Hemingway as you've never seen him before, inside the eyes of his friends, lovers, mentors, and enemies.