In the Library
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway, 1926
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 68k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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.
Isn't it pretty to think so?
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald gives the same lost generation a Long Island mansion instead of a Pamplona café, and the hangover is just as total.
£1.99
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway tells the war that broke Jake Barnes, and the love story he can't have.
£1.99
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night does the same thing, following American expatriates adrift in Europe after the war, though its wreckage is a marriage rather than a circle of drinking friends.
£1.99
About the book
Count the drinks. The Pernod, the Fundador, the cold Spanish wine drunk from a leather bag in the sun, the bottles emptied to keep the talking going and the wanting down. Jake Barnes loves Lady Brett Ashley and cannot have her: a wound from the war has seen to that, and the whole novel turns on the ache of a desire that can never be answered. So they drift, this circle of expatriates, from the cafés of Paris to the bullring at Pamplona, where Hemingway writes the running of the bulls and the grace of a young matador with a clean, unhurried attention that feels like prayer. The sentences are short and plain and somehow hold everything the characters will not say. Few books have made so much sorrow out of so little. By the last line you will understand exactly how it feels to want a thing you know you cannot keep, and to say so lightly anyway.