Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the late summer of a year of the Great War, an American named Frederic Henry is driving ambulances for the Italian army in the mountains above the Isonzo. In the officers' mess the priest is teased and Rinaldi laughs too loudly; in the garden of a British hospital he meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse still grieving a fiance killed on the Somme. What begins for both as a game to pass the war turns, almost without their noticing, into the one thing worth keeping — and the war will not leave them alone to keep it.

Ernest Hemingway drew A Farewell to Arms (1929) partly from his own wounding on the Italian front, and wrote it in the spare, clear, deceptively simple prose that changed the shape of the modern sentence. It is a war novel with almost no battles in it, and a love story that refuses every comfort — a book about rain and courage and the terrible tenderness of ordinary things, told by a man who has learned to say very little in order to say everything.

It is a story to be read first for its people and its places — the wine-lit mess at Gorizia, the summer hospital in Milan, the long retreat in the rain, the night crossing of the lake to Switzerland — and returned to ever after for the quiet that runs beneath them.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, the map of Frederic's journey, and its great scenes; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the tale so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and go down to the river and the plain and the mountains.