Ex-Wife (Faber Editions)

'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.

Ursula Parrott (1899-1957) is the pen name of Katherine Ursula Towle, author of twenty books and over one hundred stories and articles. Her 1926 divorce inspired her at first anonymous debut, Ex-Wife, which sold over 100,000 copies in 1929 and was adapted into Hollywood sensation The Divorcee, with her further screenplays starring Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages, court cases and personal struggles; she died in New York.