What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWhere My Heart Used to Beat
Sebastian Faulks · 336 pages
Robert, a British doctor haunted by World War II memories, agrees to write a biography of a renowned specialist in memory loss who possesses unsettling knowledge of Robert's past.
Keeping Watch
Laurie R. King · 383 pages
Allen Carmichael came back from Vietnam a lifetime ago--but only now was he ready to return home. For years, he’s lived on the fringes of the law, using a soldier’s skills to keep watch over those too young to defend themselves. Some consider him nothing but a kidnapper for hire--the best in the business; others call him a hero. His specialty has been rescuing children from abusive parents and esc
Wizard of the Pigeons
Megan Lindholm · 264 pages
The plot focuses on the homeless character 'Wizard' and his battle with a malignant force from his forgotten past.[3] In order to survive, Wizard must rely on his powerful gift of 'Knowing'. This allows him to know the truth of things, to receive fortunes and to reveal to people the answers to their troubles. Aiding him in his battle for survival is the enigmatic 'Cassie' and several other people
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Bao Ninh · 228 pages
The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to
These Silent Woods
Kimi Cunningham Grant · 288 pages
A father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains must reckon with the ghosts of their past in Kimi Cunningham Grant's These Silent Woods, a mesmerizing novel of suspense. No electricity, no family, no connection to the outside world. For eight years, Cooper and his young daughter, Finch, have lived in isolation in a remote cabin in the northern Appalachian woods. And that's exactly
The Razor's Edge
W. Somerset Maugham · 314 pages
This novel, supposedly based on the life of an acquaintance of Maugham, follows the fortunes of an American pilot who, traumatized by war, rejects his former conventional life to search for a more meaningful existence. After studying in Paris for two years he decides to travel, taking various menial jobs. Although being influenced by some of the people he meets it is not until he reaches India tha
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 332 pages
A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier
The Life We Bury
Allen Eskens · 303 pages
"An ordinary writing assignment for a college English class brings Joe face-to-face with a dying Vietnam veteran, who is also a convicted murderer."--
Gods Go Begging
Alfredo Vea · 320 pages
"Jesse Pasadoble, a former infantry soldier who served his country with honor and courage, is now a defense attorney living in San Francisco. It was in Vietnam that Jesse learned to "hate death and to develop an almost anguished love of the living" during a horrific siege in which he should have died but didn't. For Jesse, the battle still rages: in his tortured memories; in the gang wars that ar
The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers · 240 pages
In this haunting fictional account, an Iraq war veteran contemplates the lives, including his own, devasated by the random violence of war.
The Ninth Configuration
William Peter Blatty · 152 pages
In an experimental government center for troubled Vietnam veterans, the inmates run the asylum. One works on an adaptation of Shakespeare--for dogs. Another fancies himself a caped superhero. Still others masquerade as frogmen, nurses, nuns, pirates, doctors. Yet Colonel Vincent Kane, the psychiatrist in charge, eyes all with a stoic reserve. Maybe too stoic: there's a mystery here. And its final
The Free
Willy Vlautin · 281 pages
Severely wounded in the Iraq war, Leroy Kervin has lived in a group home for eight years. Frustrated by the simplest daily routines, he finds his existence has become unbearable. An act of desperation helps him disappear deep into his mind, into a world of romance and science fiction, danger and adventure where he is whole once again. Freddie McCall, the night man at Leroy's group home, works two
Mudbound
Hillary Jordan · 335 pages
"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld
Little Bee
Chris Cleave · 288 pages
A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 236 pages
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the s
The Pugilist at Rest
Thom Jones · 240 pages
14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien · 256 pages
*The Things They Carried* (1990) is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.
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
People of the Whale
Linda Hogan · 316 pages
Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means o
The Reason You're Alive
Matthew Quick · 226 pages
Sixty-eight-year-old David has a brain tumor that he attributes to Agent Orange exposure. He wakes up from surgery repeating the name of a Native American soldier whom he was once ordered to discipline, and decides to return something precious he long ago stole from that man.