Across the River and into the Trees

The War is just over. In Venice, a city elaborately and affectionately described, Richard Cantrell, an American colonel, falls passionately in love with Renata, a young Italian countess who has 'a profile that could break your or anyone else's heart'. Cantrell is embittered, war-scarred old enough to be Renata's father but is overwhelmed by the selflessness and freshness of the love she is offering. But this is no fairy tale. The fighting may be ended, but the wounds of war have not yet healed. And for some, the longed-for peace has come too late.

“He can perform prodigies. He can fascinate us by pure evocation, by the tensity of the situation”

"Extraordinary tour de force ... For perhaps the first time in our literature, a kind of anti-Western Western" -- Leslie A. Fiedler "Hemingway gave the century a way of making literary art that dealt with the remarkable violence of our time. He listened and watched and invented the language - using the power, the terror, of silences - with which we could name ourselves" New York Times Book Review

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

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