The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Oct 2006 · Simon and Schuster · Narrated by William Hurt

About this audiobook

2007 Audie Award Finalist for Classics

Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.​

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

“The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal

Ratings and reviews

William Hurt's reading of this book is an atrocity. It sounds as though he is sarcastic throughout the entire thing in tone, or he is confused with ending ending sentences. Either way just awful. Hemingway is such a straight forward author that such a tone really has no place with his storytelling. I get the character of Jake is a bit bitter but the way in which this is narrated by William Hurt just overkills it. Hemingway's writing explains itself, in this novel its very near reporting.

About the author

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.

William Hurt was an Academy Award winning actor whose many films include A History of Violence, The Village, Body Heat, The Big Chill, Sunshine, Smoke Eyewitness, Broadcast News, Children of a Lesser God, and Kiss of The Spiderwoman. His stage credits include Henry V, Hamlet, Richard II, HurlyBurly, and My Life. He passed away in 2022 at the age of seventy-one.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.