For Whom the Bell Tolls
By Ernest Hemingway

I first read this when I was in drama school in Australia. Like many Hemingway heroes, Robert Jordan, an American in the Spanish Civil War, is a man who tests himself. But what I come back to with Hemingway is how he captures the finiteness of love. The couples are destined to fail—you know that from the first moment—but he makes you believe that the memory is enough for these men.