A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway Narrated by Jacob Rivers

Overview

A moving love story set against the turmoil of war.

American Lieutenant Frederic Henry serves in the ambulance corps of the Italian army during World War I. While stationed in northern Italy, he meets beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley and falls in love with her. However, the passionate romance between the two is overshadowed by the horrors of war. Frederic heads to the front with a small unit, which he loses during an offensive, and must decide whether to become a deserter or die. Can he count on a stroke of luck in such grim times?

Writing A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway drew inspiration from his own war experiences. In this captivating, semi-autobiographical prose written in a spare style, he captures the harsh realities of war, its senselessness and mindless cruelty, as well as the suffering of lovers trapped in the grip of forces greater than individual desires. His portrayal of the main character reflects the loneliness and disillusionment of the "lost generation" - people who entered adulthood during World War I.

First published in 1929, the novel is one of Hemingway's finest works.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

I think A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway's greatest novel, the truest. It’s also heartbreaking.”
—Edna O’Brien

“We can’t seem to stop using a certain kind of elevated, heroic language about war and it is our duty always to puncture it. No one has ever done that as eloquently as Hemingway, through the accumulating weight of his sentences, and the emotional clarity, the disgust and also the reverence for what has been done.”
—Tobias Wolff

New York Times

The Hemingway manner is arresting purely as craftsmanship…Seldom has a literary style so precisely jumped with the time…A moving and beautiful book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194177530
Publisher:	Gates of Imagination
Publication date:	03/01/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

Copyright © 1929 by Charles Scribner's Sons
Copyright renewed 1957 © by Ernest Hemmingway

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