🧲 Books like this
Unspoken Abandonment: Sometimes the hardest part of going to war is coming home
Bryan A. Wood · 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 authorFull Measure
T. Jefferson Parker · 291 pages
"Patrick Norris has seen the worst that Afghanistan has to offer--excruciating heat, bitter cold, and death waiting behind every rock as comrades are blown to pieces by bombs and snipers. He returns home exhilarated by his new freedom and eager to realize his dream of a sport fishing business. But he is shocked to learn that the avocado ranch his family has owned for generations in the foothills o
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.
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
Silence for the Dead
Simone St. James · 384 pages
""Portis House emerged from the fog as we approached, showing itself slowly as a long, low shadow...." In 1919, Kitty Weekes, pretty, resourceful, and on the run, falsifies her background to obtain a nursing position at Portis House, a remote hospital for soldiers left shell-shocked by the horrors of the Great War. Hiding the shame of their mental instability in what was once a magnificent private
Fives and Twenty-Fives
Michael Pitre · 400 pages
"It's the rule--always watch your fives and twenty-fives. When a convoy halts to investigate a possible roadside bomb, stay in the vehicle and scan five meters in every direction. A bomb inside five meters cuts through the armor, killing everyone in the truck. Once clear, get out and sweep twenty-five meters. A bomb inside twenty-five meters kills the dismounted scouts investigating the road ahead
Shards
Ismet Prcic · 392 pages
Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a
The Burning God
R.F. Kuang · 622 pages
The exciting end to The Poppy War trilogy, R. F. Kuang’s acclaimed, award-winning epic fantasy that combines the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters, to devastating, enthralling effect. After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead. Des
Home
Toni Morrison · 154 pages
America’s most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war. Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in
Thirst
Andrey Gelasimov, Andrei Gelasimov · 116 pages
Kostoya returns from the Chechen War with a face so maimed it looks like a piece of meat. He confines himself to his lonely apartment, with no company save the vodka in his refrigerator. The woman next door checks on him regularly to see that he's still alive, and when she discovers the power his disfigured face has over her misbehaving son, she takes to using Kostoya as a disciplinary influence.
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
Sebastian Junger · 168 pages
Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe
The Dragon Republic Deluxe Collector's Edition
R. F. KUANG
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface comes an all-new, fully illustrated, hardcover Deluxe Collector's Edition of R. F. Kuang's The Dragon Republic, with a full-wrap illustrated jacket and black-and-white interior art by JungShan Chang throughout, plus embossed case, designed endpapers, and stenciled edges! Considered one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Fantasy Books o
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 Things a Brother Knows
Dana Reinhardt · 245 pages
Although they have never gotten along well, seventeen-year-old Levi follows his older brother Boaz, an ex-Marine, on a walking trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. in hopes of learning why Boaz is completely withdrawn.
The Women
Kristin Hannah · 476 pages
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her br
The Poppy Factory
Liz Trenow · 386 pages
A captivating story of two young women, bound together by the tragedy of two very different wars. With the end of the First World War, Rose is looking forward to welcoming home her beloved husband, Alfie, from the battlefields. But his return is not what Rose had expected. Traumatised by what he has seen, the Alfie who comes home is a different man to the one Rose married. As he struggles to cope
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.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain · 320 pages
A satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq that explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. Follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders. Asked to be part of the Dallas Cowboys'
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
The Heroes' Welcome
Louisa Young · 146 pages
April 1919, and Britain is realizing that it is no longer at war. Now, Nadine and Riley, Rose, and Peter and Julia, must try to regain a sense of normality. But long shadows cast by the war dim the potential joys of peacetime, and matters of the heart prove arduous and bewildering. Normality doesn't seem to exist the way it did, and there is no 'going back' to anything. What must give, for happine