A Farewell to Arms

On the Italian front in the First World War, Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant serving with an ambulance unit, meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse grieving a fiancé killed in France. What begins as a careless game becomes, after Frederic is wounded and sent to recover at a hospital in Milan, a love that both of them cling to against the madness around them. But the war will not let them go. Sent back to the front, Frederic is swept up in the chaos of the retreat from Caporetto, and must decide what he still owes to an army in collapse and what he owes to the woman he loves.

Drawn from Ernest Hemingway’s own service and wounding in Italy, A Farewell to Arms made its author famous in 1929. Spare, intensely felt, and unflinching about war and love, it remains one of the great novels of the twentieth century.