Across the River and Through the Trees

The hours of this novel tell a love story, tender and moving, but dark under the inexorable shadow of what must come. The story is a thing of mood, flawlessly projected. Venice is part of it, a Venice whose canals, bars, and cosmopolitan hotel life are at first less familiar under a winter sky, but a Venice that has never been made so real. There is the incomparable Hemingway magic---a duck blind with a thin skim of morning ice over its waters; the Venetian countryside seen from a moving car, every mile alive with memories of two wars. And over it all is the brooding awareness of the tragic which invests all the great Hemingway novels, an awareness into which he has always admitted his readers from the start. (From the dustjacket)