AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Speed of Light

Javier Cercas · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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

Vietnam WarWar TraumaSurvivor's GuiltWriter Protagonist
❤️

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.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaSurvivor's GuiltWriter Protagonist
❤️

Sophie's Choice

William Styron · 625 pages

The gripping, unforgettable story of Stingo, a 22-year-old writer; Sophie, a Polish-Catholic beauty who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; and Nathan, her mercurial lover. The three friends share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.

War TraumaWriter ProtagonistSurvivor's GuiltLiterary Fiction
🙂

Paco's Story

Larry Heinemann · 209 pages

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of wha

Vietnam WarWar TraumaSurvivor's GuiltLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Throat

Peter Straub · 704 pages

Tim Underhill, now an acclaimed novelist, travels back to his hometown of Millhaven, Illinois after he gets a call from John Ransom, an old army buddy. Ransom believes there's a copycat killer on the loose, mimicking the Blue Rose murders from decades earlier-he thinks his wife could be a potential victim. Underhill seeks out his old friend Tom Pasmore, an aging hermit who has attained minor celeb

Vietnam WarWar TraumaWriter ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Short-Timers

Gustav Hasford · 180 pages

L'opera prima di un ex combattente che ha vissuto direttamente l'inferno della guerra. Siamo in Vietnam nel 1968. Dopo un addestramento selvaggio, i giovani marines sono precipitati in un panorama d'incubo, annerito dal napalm e infestato da cadaveri umani in decomposizione. È allora che la Guerra lascia cadere la maschera di Gloria, Onore, Virilità e Amor Patrio e mostra il suo volto vero. Il cap

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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

War TraumaSurvivor's GuiltFirst Person NarratorWar Atrocities
🙂

Novel Without A Name

Duong Thu Huong · 292 pages

A piercing, unforgettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war, Novel Without a Name will shatter every preconception Americans have about what happened in the jungles of Vietnam. With Duong Thu Huong, whose Paradise of the Blind was published to high critical acclaim in 1993, Vietnam has found a voice both lyrical and stark, powerful enough to capture the conflict that left millions

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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.

War TraumaSurvivor's GuiltLiterary FictionWar Atrocities
🙂

The Sentimentalists

Johanna Skibsrud · 216 pages

"Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud's narrator maps her father's past. Napoleon Haskell lives with Henry in the town of Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Fields of Fire

James Webb · 415 pages

The story of a platoon of Marines fighting in Vietnam evokes the ambiguous and gruesome character of the war and contrasts man's realization of war's dangers with his attraction to war as the ultimate test of survival.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionWar Atrocities
🙂

Dispatches

Michael Herr · 260 pages

Written on the front lines in Vietnam, *Dispatches* became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, *Dispatches* makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retelling

Vietnam WarWar TraumaFirst Person NarratorWar Atrocities
🙂

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."--

Vietnam WarWar TraumaWriter ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Ha-Ha

Dave King · 360 pages

Howard Kapostash has not spoken in thirty years. The small repertory of gestures and simple sounds that he uses to communicate lead most people to assume he is disturbed. No one understands that Howard is still the same man he was before his tragic injury. But when he agrees to help an old girlfriend by opening his home to her nine-year-old son, the presence of this nervous, resourceful boy in his

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Writer ProtagonistSurvivor's GuiltLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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

War TraumaSurvivor's GuiltLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

War TraumaSurvivor's GuiltLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Fallen Angels

Walter Dean Myers · 309 pages

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaFirst Person NarratorWar Atrocities
🙂

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

Smoky Joe's Cafe

Bryce Courtenay · 241 pages

Thommo and the surviving members of his platoon return from the Vietnam War to an Australia that regards them as mercenaries guilty of war crimes. Suffering from physical and mental problems, they band together to plot revenge.

Vietnam WarWar TraumaLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

Gaito Gazdanov · 187 pages

On a searing hot day in 1919, a young Russian soldier shoots another in self-defence. As the other man lies dying, the young soldier takes his horse and rides away. Years later, as a grown man in Paris whose life is still haunted by the murder he committed all that time ago, he comes across a story by a writer calling himself 'Alexander Wolf', which recounts in astonishing detail the events of tha

Survivor's GuiltWar TraumaLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Book of Jonas

Stephen Dau · 258 pages

When his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in the Middle East, fifteen-year-old Jonas is sent to live with a foster family in America and struggles to adapt before revealing the heroics of a missing soldier who saved his life.

War TraumaSurvivor's GuiltLiterary FictionWar Atrocities

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.