They were friends, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner. Between 1948 and 1961, they traveled together from New York to Paris to Spain, they fished the waters off Cuba, they hunted in Idaho, they ran with the bulls in Pamplona. And everywhere they talked.

For fourteen years Hotchner and Hemingway shared a conversation. In it Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene in the twenties, remembered his early years as a writer, recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction. And Hotchner took it down.

His notes on the many occasions he spent with his friend Papa - in Venice and Rome, in Key West, on the Riviera, in Ketchum (Idaho), where Hemingway died by his own hand in 1961 - provide the material for this utterly truthful, profoundly compassionate bestselling memoir of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinning author. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a great writer who had, and determined, the time of his life.