Michael Reynolds' "Hemingway: The Homecoming", originally issued in 1992 as "Hemingway: The American Homecoming", is the 3rd book of a 5 Volume Biography of Ernest Hemingway. I came across a downloadable audiobook edition of this on Amazon.com & Audible Inc. which was released by them on June 27, 2013 but which has since (as of early July 2013) been discontinued for sale. The removal from sale may be due to some marketing faults in the book's presentation and presumably it will reappear once those have been adjusted. The cover of the initial audiobook edition mistakenly used the cover of the print edition of the combined Volume 4 "The 1930s" and Volume 5 "The Final Years" and the text description read a bit too much* like a description of Volume 2 "The Paris Years." The audiobook is narrated by actor Allen O'Reilly. One further technical issue with the audiobook is that either the original reading or the post-production edit is at a fast speed which isn't always at a comfortable listening rate. The first edition release that I heard was 8 hours and 19 minutes, so it will be interesting if a future reissue will have slowed that down.

The Hemingway period covered in the book is the latter half of the 1920's which is the end of the Paris years and the divorce with first wife Hadley Richardson and the marriage and beginning of the Key West years with second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. "The Homecoming" of the title refers to the return to the USA and the establishment of a new base in Key West, Florida. Hemingway's books that were written and published during this time were "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "Men Without Women" (1927) and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929). Also the writing of the unfinished and abandoned 1927 novel "Jimmy Breen" is discussed.

This book (as does all of Reynolds' Hemingway) tells the story of Hemingway's life in a narrative novel style which concentrates primarily on a 3rd person description of the life events without a lot of sidetracking or interpretation. Excerpts from the stories and novels are inserted into the text especially where they are a development or extension of the true life events they were based on. Those who have read the primary single volume biographies by Carlos Baker, Kenneth Lynn and Jeffrey Meyer will likely not find anything new here but the novel style of storytelling does make it more approachable than the more standard biography style. We can only hope that this audiobook edition will see a reissue with errors repaired and that further volumes of the series will be made available. Due to the faults of this first issue (esp. the speed of the reading) I have to give this a 3 out of 5.

* "The 1920s in Paris are the pivotal years in Hemingway's apprenticeship as a writer, whether sitting in cafés or at the feet of Gertrude Stein. These are the heady times of the Nick Adams short stories, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the writing of The Sun Also Rises. These are also the years of Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson, the birth of his first son, and his discovery of the bullfights at Pamplona." ( )