In the Library
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 41
- Length
- Length 88k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
In the late summer of that year the troops march past a house on a river, and the dust they raise powders the leaves of the trees so they fall early. That is how the book begins, in a prose so clean it seems to have had everything inessential burned off it, every word load-bearing, every short sentence a held breath. Frederic Henry, an American driving ambulances for the Italian army, finds Catherine Barkley in a war he no longer believes in, and what starts as a way to pass the nights becomes the only thing either of them has. Hemingway writes their happiness so plainly that you trust it completely, which is the trap, because the rain keeps falling and Catherine is afraid of the rain. Few novels know so exactly that the world breaks everyone, and that it kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. Read it for the tenderness that survives all the way to the last cold page.