Hello and welcome to Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about the Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, an absolutely fantastic novel.

And obviously, I couldn't cover it without speaking to the man who recommended the novel

in the first place, which is, of course, you, Mr. Bodeade.

How are you?

Yeah, fine, thank you.

Yeah, I always enjoy chatting to you, particularly about history and literature and stuff.

So, yeah, you're sort of on the lookout for, there's sort of endless possibilities with your series.

There's so many things.

But one, it's quite a short novel.

It's almost really a novella, really.

You can read it. Two hours. Yeah. Two and a half hours.

The audiobook is only a couple of hours or so. But it's one I've always loved. But it's very famous, isn't it? It won prizes and things.

Yes. So it came out in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 53. And it seems to have been something of a comeback for Hemingway as well.

Because by that time in 52, I believe he'd, by 52, he had a book called Across the River and Into the Trees.

And this was critically panned.

He was just being told by critics, is lost it.

He's not as good.

It's not up there with those Hemingway classics,

farewell to Wams and all those incredible novels that first made his career.

And so when he published The Old Man in the Sea, he said, I mean, it's a very Hemingway of him, but he said, it's the best thing I've ever written. He just knew that he'd nailed it with this one. Yeah. So, I mean, a little bit about Hemingway's life, or we talk loads about Hemingway, an incredible life. But one of the things to say is that, Yeah, this is right at the end of the career. He's an old man. Yes. Hemingway is an old man by this point. He's sort of famously committed suicide, but he was getting on. And yeah, even by the war years, people had said he's over it, he's passed it. He did all his best work as a young man. Because Farewell to Arms is about World War I, isn't it?

He was in World War I.

Yes.

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