A Farewell to Arms: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Verghese (Foreword by)

Overview

Hemingway’s beloved novel of doomed love during wartime, now available for the first time from Penguin Classics, with a new foreword by Abraham Verghese, the multimillion-copy bestselling author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

A Farewell to Arms is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most popular books, a masterpiece that is not only among the greatest novels to come out of World War I but also one of the most profoundly moving in the American canon. Based on Hemingway’s own experience volunteering with the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, and written when he was only thirty, it tells the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. For Frederic, Catherine’s kindness and beauty shore him up against the carnage of battle; for Catherine, Frederic’s strength and devotion are a lifeboat in the sea of grief over her first love. Through injury, surgery, and the psychic fallout of war, they maintain an overwhelming desire to be together, even as forces conspire to keep them apart. Hemingway captures the intensity of both love and war with the taut immediacy and spare, understated eloquence that are his hallmarks, reminding us why this novel—his first bestseller—endures as a favorite, and why the Nobel laureate ranks among our most treasured writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143138839
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Series:	Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Series
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.62(w) x 8.44(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961) wrote in a clear, spare, deceptively simple style that made him one of the most admired and imitated authors of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, he traveled widely throughout his life, living in Italy, France, Spain, and Cuba, and reporting from the frontlines of World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. His best-known novels are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. A year later Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Abraham Verghese (foreword) is the author of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestselling novels The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone, and the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. In 2016 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

Date of Birth:

July 21, 1899

Date of Death:

July 2, 1961

Place of Birth:

Oak Park, Illinois

Place of Death:

Ketchum, Idaho

Editorial Reviews

I believe A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway’s finest novel. It is also the quintessential war novel. . . . When I first read A Farewell to Arms, it took only a few chapters for me to know I was reading something very different. . . . As a budding writer, I found much to admire in the way Hemingway drew on his experience with trauma, death, and chaotic medical intervention. . . . I have read A Farewell to Arms many times over the last fifty years, and I love how well it holds up with each reading.” —Abraham Verghese, from the Foreword

“A moving and beautiful book.” —The New York Times

“A towering ornament of American literature.” —The Washington Times

From the Publisher

Golden Voice narrator Edoardo Ballerini has the perfect voice to match the crisp rhythms and assured ease of Hemingway's celebrated prose style in his bestselling semi-autobiographical 1929 classic about an American adventurer who joins the Italian Army in WWI. Known for its realistic depiction of the violence and destruction of war, the novel follows the travails and growth of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, whose tone begins as nonchalant as he pals around with his new comrades. Ballerini has a fine time giving voice to the Italian accents. He gives Henry an apprehensive tone as he recovers from a severe battle wound and, finally, a hopeful tone as Henry and his new love, Catherine, escape across the Swiss border. Fear, courage, and desire are some of the major themes of this twentieth-century work of literature. B.P. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2025 - AudioFile