A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel follows Frederic Henry, an American serving in the Italian ambulance corps during the First World War, and Catherine Barkley, the English nurse he meets behind the lines. Their affair begins as wartime distraction and deepens into a private world they try to defend against the chaos around them. Hemingway draws on his own experience as an ambulance driver in Italy, and the book moves between the muddy front, hospital wards in Milan, and the lakes of neutral Switzerland. The prose is famously pared down, with short declarative sentences carrying enormous weight. The result is one of the defining novels of the lost generation and a quietly devastating love story.
What you might want to know about A Farewell to Arms
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An American ambulance driver on the Italian front falls in love with an English nurse, and the war pulls their plans apart.
Barrymore picked the novel on both her One Grand Books desert-island list and her 2016 favorites list for The Week, calling it the book that made her cry the hardest of anything she has read.
Loosely. Hemingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War and was wounded near the Piave, and he drew on those months while writing the novel.
A Farewell to Arms was written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1929 by Scribner.
A Farewell to Arms is 332 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Farewell to Arms takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
A Farewell to Arms is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.