For whom the bell tolls

Summary: 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.