The Red Collar

The Fires of Autumn

Irene Nemirovsky · 274 pages

"After four years of bloody warfare Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. No more the naive hopes and dreams of the teenager who went to war. Attracted by the lure of money and success, Bernard embarks on a life of luxuriant delinquency supported by suspect financial dealings and easy virtue."

Three Soldiers

John dos Passos · 433 pages

John Dos Passos had just returned from studying architecture in Spain when America entered World War I and - driven by the idealism that infected many young Americans (including Hemingway and e.e. cummings) - he joined up as a driver for the Ambulance Corps. His rapid and profound disillusionment forms the core of Three Soldiers, a fierce denunciation of the military and of the far-reaching social

The Regeneration Trilogy

Pat Barker · 608 pages

Regeneration: When Dr William Rivers treats a patient at a mental hospital who has spoken out against World War I, the relationship that develops between them makes them debate the logic of their respective positions. Thus the doctor questions the sanity of the war which is his duty to return his patients to. The eye in the door: Drawing of the history of the Pemberton Billing libel trial in wh

Her Privates We

Frederic Manning · 288 pages

Originally published in a censored version, thanks to the realistic level of swearing in the soldiers' dialogue, 'Her Privates We' offers a unique insight into the life of a British infantryman in the trenches in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Somme. The author was an educated misfit who served alongside ordinary working class men; this gave him both the ability and the motivation to

The Stone Carvers

Jane Urquhart · 396 pages

The Lie

Helen Dunmore · 293 pages

"Cornwall, 1920, early spring. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about

Bereft

Chris Womersley · 235 pages

The year is 1919 and the Great War has ended. Sergeant Quinn Walker, damaged body and soul by his experiences in the killing fields of France, decides to return home to the small and desolate town of Flint, Australia, to set right the past.

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Siegfried Sassoon · 307 pages

"A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war. The second volume of Siegfried Sassoon's semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy picks up shortly after Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man: in 1916, with

Company K

William March · 183 pages

Stemming directly from the author's experiences with the U.S. Marines in France during World War I, the book consists of 113 sketches, or chapters, tracing the fictional Company K's war exploits and providing an emotional history of the men of the company that extends beyond the boundaries of the war itself.

Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo · 271 pages

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered--not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives ... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome ... but so is wa

The Dust That Falls from Dreams

Louis de Bernieres · 511 pages

In the brief golden years before the outbreak of World War I, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood adventure are shadowed by the approach of the conflict that will engulf them on the cusp of adulthood. When the boys end up s

The Road Back

Erich Maria Remarque · 340 pages

After four grueling years the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable. For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering f

Three Day Road

Joseph Boyden · 400 pages

Birdsong

Sebastian Faulks · 483 pages

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale.Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love aff

Not So Quiet...

Helen Zenna Smith · 239 pages

"...Offers a scathing firsthand account of war from the point of view of women actively engaged in it. Helen Zenna Smith and her companions are volunteer ambulance drivers. They've actually paid for the privilege of serving at the French frontlines, seemingly so their upperclass mothers may brag about who has given up the most for the war effort. The bite of the novel comes from Smith's outrage at

War and Turpentine

Stefan Hertmans · 320 pages

A Soldier of the Great War

Mark Helprin · 792 pages

A Roman student is torn from his carefree life when World War I breaks out, and fifty years later, recounts the triumphs and tragedies of his existence to an illiterate factory worker.

The Great Swindle

Pierre Lemaitre · 462 pages

"The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hol

The Cartographer of No Man's Land

P.S. Duffy · 377 pages

"When his beloved brother-in-law goes missing at the front in 1916, Angus defies his pacifist upbringing to join the war and find him. Assured a position as a cartographer in London, he is instead sent directly into the visceral shock of battle. Meanwhile, at home, his son Simon Peter must navigate escalating hostility in a fishing village torn by grief"--Amazon.com.

Not all Bastards are from Vienna

Andrea Molesini · 348 pages

Andrea Molesini's exquisite debut novel, winner of the prestigious Campiello Prize, portrays the depths of heroism and horror within a Northern Italian village toward the end of the Great War. While a family's villa is requisitioned by enemy troops, they are forced to intimately confront war's injustice as their involvement with its sinister underpinnings grows more and more complex. In the autumn

A God in Every Stone

Kamila Shamsie · 359 pages

July 1914. A young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer is running up a mountainside in an ancient land. She picks up a fig and holds it to her nose. Around her is a maze of broken columns, taller than the tallest of men. Nearby is the familiar lean form of her father's old friend, Tahsin Bey, an archaeologist. Viv is about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure and the ecstasy of love

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

Grey Souls

Philippe Claudel · 183 pages

"A shocking crime is committed in a small town in north-east France in the dead of the bitter winter of 1917, as the war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town. But the town itself is untouched. One morning, a beautiful ten-year-old girl, one of the three daughters of the local innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls immediately on

The Return of Captain John Emmett

Elizabeth Speller · 442 pages

Mary Emmett's brother John, an officer during the recently ended World War I, has apparently killed himself while in the care of a remote veterans' hospital, and Mary needs to know why. She contacts an old flame, Laurence Bartram, who has turned his back on the world to help her find answers.