Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver with the Italian army during the First World War, meets Catherine Barkley, an English nursing aide whose fiancé was killed in the war in France. At first he considers their relationship a game; after he is badly injured and taken to Milan for surgery he falls deeply in love with Catherine. Catherine becomes pregnant, but they are unable to get married in wartime Italy. Frederic returns to the front, where he takes part in the retreat of the Italian army from Caporetto, in which there is much confusion and demoralization. Separated from his unit, Frederic is arrested by a military patrol and about to be shot for desertion as an officer when he escapes by jumping into a river. Realizing that the war no longer matters to him, he rejoins Catherine; to avoid arrest, they escape to neutral Switzerland in a small boat. After living happily together in the mountains for several months, they move to Lausanne before Catherine is to deliver their child. She has serious difficulty in labor. The child, delivered by a Caesarean section, dies; shortly afterwards Catherine dies. Frederic is left alone, with the realization that one is always 'trapped', that his search for happiness has been doomed by the nature of life.
             High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerilla band operating behind the lines of Franco's army prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent from the Republic to handle the dynamiting. In the mountains he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war - and he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels...
             The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first big novel, and immediately established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists, and one of the preeminent writers of his time. It i
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