Ex-Wife — Ursula Parrott

'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

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.