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  • Published: 18 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784872045
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $24.99

Islands in the Stream




Ernest Hemingway's last novel written before his death and his most autobiographical

Hemingway's last major novel, set in the Gulf Stream islands, captures the struggles of adult personal relationships in his consummate distinctive style.

'He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane'

This is the last book Hemingway wrote before he died, the story of Thomas Hudson, an artist and adventurer. Living a bachelor's life on an island in the Gulf Stream during the thirties, Hudson's existence is dictated by the waves and tides. But when his sons come to visit, Hudson must grapple with the role of father and the unfamiliar demands of family.

A late work by one of America's greatest writers.

'Hemingway's most deeply autobiographical piece of work' Irish Times

  • Published: 18 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9781784872045
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Ernest Hemingway

ERNEST HEMINGWAY was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, the child of a physician and a musician. After high school, he became a journalist with The Kansas City Star, before enlisting to be an ambulance driver in World War I. He returned home after a serious injury in 1918, but his military experience informed his fiction, especially A Farewell to Arms. He worked as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star during his first marriage, and over the next three marriages he would live in Paris, London, Key West, and Cuba. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two nonfiction titles. On safari in Africa in 1952 he survived two plane crashes, though his obituaries ran prematurely. He lived on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Two trunks of his early work from Paris reappeared in 1957, and inspired him to write his memoir A Moveable Feast. He eventually committed suicide in Idaho in 1961.

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Praise for Islands in the Stream

Hemingway’s style is a superb vehicle for revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality

Guardian

Many of the episodes contain the most exciting and effective writing Hemingway has ever done

Saturday Review

This book contains some of the best of Hemingway's descriptions of nature: the waves breaking white and green on the reef off the coast of Cuba; the beauty of the morning on the deep water; the hermit crabs and land crabs and ghost crabs; a big barracuda stalking mullet; a heron flying with his white wings over the green water; the ibis and flamingoes and spoonbills, the last of these beautiful with the sharp rose of their color; the mosquitoes in clouds from the marshes; the water that curled and blew under the lash of the wind; the sculpture that the wind and sand had made of a piece of driftwood, gray and sanded and embedded in white, floury sand

Edmund Wilson, Saturday Review

Hemingway's most deeply autobiographical piece of work

Irish Times

Thomas Hudson, the painter in the book Islands in the Streamis Hemingway himself, attempting to come to terms with everything he loves - the clarity of a brushstroke, his three children, his ex-wives, his lovers, his whores, his friends, his cats, his rifle, his Booth's gin

Newsweek