Recommendations
Books Like A Farewell to Arms
What to read after A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) is the great American war novel — Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in World War One Italy, ending in the rain. If you were drawn to Hemingway's stripped, devastating prose and his understanding of how love and war share the same grammar of loss, these novels will find you in the same place.
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's companion novel — Lost Generation expatriates in Paris and Pamplona before the stock market crash; the same iceberg prose, the same war wound in the background (literal in Jake Barnes's case), the same understanding that the Great War permanently altered what it was possible to feel
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
A German soldier's experience of the same World War One — published the same year as A Farewell to Arms (1929); where Hemingway is elliptical and dry, Remarque is explicit and direct; together the two novels constitute the most important fiction of the Great War
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
An American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War — Hemingway's longest and most politically engaged novel; the same themes of love under the pressure of imminent death, but with a fuller political canvas and a more complex hero than Frederic Henry
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The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
A badly burned man in an Italian villa at the end of World War Two, tended by a nurse — a love story and a war novel in the same tradition as A Farewell to Arms; Ondaatje's lush, fragmentary prose is the opposite of Hemingway's iceberg style, but the emotional territory is the same
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Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
An English officer in the trenches of World War One — Faulks's most ambitious novel; longer and more conventionally structured than A Farewell to Arms, but one of the most fully realized portraits of the Western Front in any fiction, and the most Hemingway-adjacent novel by a British writer
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Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, and his slow disintegration on the French Riviera in the 1920s — Fitzgerald's most personal novel, written in the same American expatriate world as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises; less economical than Hemingway but more psychologically complex
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A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's posthumous memoir of Paris in the 1920s — the biographical context for both A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises; how he learned to write, who taught him, what he ate, drank, and thought about; essential for anyone who wants to understand where the style came from
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
A Vietnam veteran's account of what his unit carried — literally and otherwise — through the war; the most important American war writing since Hemingway, written in the same tradition of understatement and emotional compression; O'Brien is Hemingway's direct heir in American letters
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