Books like A Farewell to Arms

For the same war with even less illusion

Published the same year as A Farewell to Arms, Remarque follows young German soldiers who discover that all the grand language about courage and patriotism has very little to do with mud, hunger, terror, boredom, and watching their friends die. His prose is direct and unsentimental in a way Hemingway readers usually respond to immediately. There is less romance, but the same conviction that war is mostly something endured by ordinary people rather than something glorious.

For another Hemingway love story running out of time

An American fighting in the Spanish Civil War falls in love with Maria while preparing for a mission he knows may kill him. Hemingway returns to many of the things that make A Farewell to Arms hurt: war, sex, fear, courage, drinking, and two people discovering how much a few days together can matter. It is longer and more political, but emotionally it may be the closest novel Hemingway wrote to it.

For love made unbearable by the fear of losing it

During wartime London, a writer becomes consumed first by his affair with a married woman and then by the question of why she suddenly ended it. Greene is more openly interested in jealousy, faith, and obsession than Hemingway, but he shares Hemingway’s ability to write intense emotion without turning it sentimental. Both novels understand that loving someone becomes frightening once you realize that love gives you no control over whether they stay.

For Hemingway at his most stripped down

These early stories are full of soldiers, wounded men, failed relationships, drinking, violence, fishing, sex, and people trying not to say the thing that is actually troubling them. They are shorter and more fragmented than A Farewell to Arms, but the style is unmistakably the same: simple sentences carrying much more emotion than they appear to. Read this if the way Hemingway writes mattered to you as much as Frederic and Catherine’s story.

For war entering the most private parts of a life

A British officer returns from the First World War with shell shock and no memory of his marriage, believing instead that he is still in love with a woman from his youth. The novel is short, controlled, and much more interested in the emotional damage of war than in combat itself. Like A Farewell to Arms, it lets a huge historical catastrophe reveal itself through a handful of intimate relationships.

For the men who survive and still cannot go home

Remarque follows German soldiers after the First World War as they return to jobs, families, relationships, and a civilian society that expects them to become ordinary again. They discover that surviving the battlefield did not restore the people they were before it. The writing is clear and direct, and if Hemingway’s wounded, dislocated men interested you, this shows what happens when the war ends but the damage does not.

For love and war remembered after both are gone

Kien survives the Vietnam War, but his memories of combat, dead friends, and the woman he loved before the war refuse to remain in the past. The novel moves through memory rather than following a straight chronology, but emotionally it is remarkably close to Hemingway: love and war become inseparable because each has permanently changed the way the narrator experiences the other. It is haunting without needing to constantly announce that it is tragic.

For Hemingway’s lonely men before Frederic Henry

These stories contain boxers, soldiers, killers, husbands, failed lovers, and men who are much better at enduring pain than talking about it. You can feel Hemingway working through the same ideas about masculinity, loss, emotional restraint, and loneliness that become central to A Farewell to Arms two years later. If Frederic’s refusal to explain himself was part of what made him interesting, these stories live in that same silence.

For a wounded man quietly trying to become himself again

A veteran of the First World War spends a summer in a small English village restoring a medieval painting while recovering from the war and a failed marriage. Very little happens in the conventional sense, but beneath the calm surface are trauma, loneliness, attraction, regret, and the knowledge that certain happy moments cannot be kept. Carr’s prose is restrained and precise, and Hemingway readers who love what is left unsaid may find this surprisingly close in spirit.

For love refusing to accept what the war says happened

Mathilde is told that her fiancé died during the First World War, but the official account does not satisfy her, so she begins reconstructing what happened to him. The book is part love story, part mystery, moving through trenches, letters, bureaucratic records, memories, and people whose versions of the truth do not quite agree. It is more intricate than Hemingway, but it shares his understanding that war separates lovers through confusion and chance as often as through anything meaningful.

For wartime love remembered in fragments

Near the end of the Second World War, several damaged people gather in an Italian villa while the history of a badly burned patient and his catastrophic love affair gradually emerges. Ondaatje’s prose is much more lyrical than Hemingway’s, so this is not a stylistic twin, but the emotional territory is close: Europe at war, hospitals, wounded bodies, forbidden intimacy, and a love that history has already turned into memory.

For two lovers who may never get the time they deserve

Cecilia and Robbie have barely recognized what they mean to each other when a terrible accusation separates them and the Second World War makes getting back to one another even harder. McEwan writes more elaborately than Hemingway, but the central ache is very similar: two people discover something real between them and then encounter forces far larger than their relationship. Read it if the doomed possibility of a life Frederic and Catherine might have had was what stayed with you.

For desperate love without romantic prose

A drifter falls for a married woman, and their affair quickly becomes something dangerous that neither of them can control. There is no war, but Cain’s short, hard sentences, emotional restraint, sex, fatalism, and sense that happiness is already doomed make this a surprisingly strong match for A Farewell to Arms. If what you loved was Hemingway’s ability to write about desperate love without making the prose romantic, this is one of the closest books on the list.

For fatalism, exhaustion, and stripped-down prose

This is lean, brutal, and almost allergic to decoration. A young man and woman meet in Depression-era Hollywood and enter a grueling dance marathon because neither has much else going for them. There is no war, but the fatalism, exhaustion, stripped-down prose, and refusal to sentimentalize suffering feel much closer to Hemingway than a lot of the “war novels” I originally gave you.

For catastrophe described without emotional instruction

Camus writes in short, plain sentences about a man who seems almost detached from the events of his own life, even when those events become catastrophic. It does not give you Hemingway’s romance or war, but it gives you that powerful feeling of enormous things being described without the prose telling you how enormous they are.

For expatriate dislocation and quiet disaster

An American couple travel through North Africa while their marriage quietly disintegrates, and the further they move from home, the less stable everything becomes. Bowles is stranger and more atmospheric than Hemingway, but he shares the emotional coolness, expatriate dislocation, fatalism, sex, and sense that disaster can arrive without any moral meaning attached to it.