Following her last novel, 2015’s Circling the Sun (which I blogged about here), Paula McLain has written another historical novel, Love and Ruin, featuring a real-life heroine, this time journalist and author Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn, born in 1908 it St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century. During her career, she covered the Spanish Civil War and Word War II, reporting from the field in Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England at a time when female correspondents were rare to say the least. Despite being denied official press credentials partway through the war, she was also on scene to cover the landings at Normandy after sneaking aboard a hospital ship and was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day. Continue reading →