Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel draws on his own experience as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I. It follows American lieutenant Frederic Henry and the English nurse Catherine Barkley as their love affair deepens against the backdrop of the disastrous Caporetto retreat, rendered in Hemingway’s legendary spare, declarative prose.
A masterpiece of modernist fiction, the novel refuses romantic consolation even as it strains toward it, and its famous ending remains one of the most devastating in American literature. Download this free EPUB from Better Gutenberg and read one of the great war novels.