A Farewell to Arms

Frederic Henry is an American serving as an ambulance officer on the Italian front of the First World War, where the war mostly means waiting, drinking, and dark jokes with the doctors, until it suddenly means shellfire. Wounded, he is sent to a hospital in Milan and falls, at first carelessly and then completely, for Catherine Barkley, an English nurse carrying losses of her own. Their affair grows against the war's collapse, including the nightmarish retreat from Caporetto, one of the great sustained sequences in modern fiction.

Hemingway strips the language down until what is not said presses on every line. Rain, roads, rivers, and two people trying to build a separate peace in the middle of history. That famous spare prose is a gift to the ear: short declarative sentences, spoken rhythms, and an ending that lands like weather.

At roughly 87,600 words, A Farewell to Arms runs about 9½ hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

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