For Whom the Bell Tolls

'There is nothing to writing. Ail you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.'
Ernest Hemingway
Set in 1937, just after the bombing of Guernica, this novel is Hemingway's response to the Spanish Civil War. His protagonist, Robert Jordan, is an American explosives expert who joins a Republican guerrilla unit in the mountains and is ordered to blow up a bridge near the city of Segovia. As he prepares for the task, he falls in love with Maria, whose life has been shattered by the conflict.
Hemingway worked as a war correspondent in Spain and, informed by his experiences on the battlefront, this suspenseful, action-packed novel is laid out in his usual spare journalistic prose. One of the great novels about war.