About the book (from Wikipedia):
Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of U.S. Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
Hemingway’s novel opens with Colonel Richard Cantwell, a 50-year-old US Army officer, duck hunting in the Marano Lagoon, on the Adriatic Coast between Venice and Trieste, Italy at the close of World War II. It is revealed that Cantwell has a terminal heart condition, and most of the novel takes the form of a lengthy flashback, detailing his experiences in Italy during World War I through the days leading up to the duck hunt. The bulk of the narrative deals with his star-crossed romance of a Venetian woman named Renata who is over thirty years his junior.
