Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Joke is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, but with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change.
When the couple drifts to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman he loves.
Powerful, intense, visually magnificent, Fiesta is the novel which established Ernest Hemingway as a writer of genius.
'Hemingway captures atmosphere by reticence and breathes life into his characters by pages left unsaid... It is American; it is literature; and it is a first novel by a genius' EVENING NEWS
'Remarkable, startling, disquieting' SPECTATOR