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 authorThe Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer · 721 pages
Based on Mailer’s own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, *The Naked and the Dead* is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare. Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 186 pages
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Bomber
Len Deighton · 493 pages
The classic novel of the Second World War that relates in devastating detail the 24-hour story of an allied bombing raid.Bomber is a novel war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying
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 Undertaking
Audrey Magee · 287 pages
"In a desperate bid to escape the trenches of the Eastern front, Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met, in a marriage of convenience that promises 'honeymoon' leave for him and a pension for her should he die in the war. With ten days' leave secured, Peter visits his new wife in Berlin, and both are surprised by the passion that develops betwe
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
To Die in Spring
Ralf Rothmann · 211 pages
"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier. Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son -- the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel -- is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however,
Beaufort
Ron Leshem · 320 pages
Beaufort is at once a searing coming-ofage story and a novel for our times - one of the most powerful, visceral portraits of the horror, camaraderie, and absurdity of war in modern fiction." "Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress. it is a little slice of hell - a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave perched atop two acres of land in southern Lebanon, surro
Generals Die in Bed
Charles Yale Harrison · 249 pages
A young soldier with the Canadian forces questions the meaning of heroism, of truth, and of good and evil as he describes life in the trenches during World War I.
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
The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw · 677 pages
The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.
Mila 18
Leon Uris · 539 pages
An historical novel about the Jewish Resistance fighters who took on the might of the Nazis in German occupied Warsaw during WW2. As the Jewish ghetto gradually shrinks and becomes cut off from the outside world a handful of its residents take up arms to maintain their freedom and their dignity in a struggle they know cannot be won.
Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths
Shigeru Mizuki · 372 pages
Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages
The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 463 pages
*Catch-22* is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, *Catch-22* is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousan
South by Java Head
Alistair MacLean · 272 pages
A classic World War 2 adventure set in south-east Asia. February, 1942: Singapore lies burning and shattered, defenceless before the conquering hordes of the Japanese Army, as the last boat slips out of the harbour into the South China Sea. On board are a desperate group of people, each with a secret to guard, each willing to kill to keep that secret safe. Who or what is the dissolute Englishman,
The Thin Red Line
James Jones · 477 pages
They are the men of C-for-Charlie Company--"Mad" 1stSgt. Eddie Welsh, SSgt. Don Doll, Pvt. John Bell, Capt. James Stein, Cpl. Fife, and dozens more just like them--infantrymen in "this man's army" who are about to land grim and white-faced on an atoll in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. This is their story, a shatteringly realistic walk into hell and back. In the days ahead some will earn medals; o
The Poppy War
R.F. Kuang · 545 pages
Winner of the Reddit Fantasy Award for Best Debut 2018 ‘The best fantasy debut of 2018’ – WIRED
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Stephen E. Ambrose · 336 pages
Follows the 101st Airbone as it drops into Normandy on D-Day and fights its way through Europe to the end of World War II.
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.

