The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway's first novel, published in 1926, and it follows a group of American and British expatriates living in Paris in the years after the First World War. Jake Barnes narrates, and his account is the whole world of the book: the cafés, the drinking, the work of journalism and the money people are living on.

The trip that organises the novel is to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the group watches the bullfights and the running of the bulls. Brett Ashley is at the centre of the men's attention and the reason the party cannot stay peaceful, and the fishing trip to Burguete that comes before Pamplona is the closest the book gets to ease.

Hemingway wrote it as a portrait of a generation whose war was over but not finished, and Jake's condition is the central fact of his life without ever being the subject of the book. The style is deliberately bare, with the travel, the arguing and the drinking carrying almost all of the feeling, and the war is referred to rather than shown.