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Reading List · WarThe Best War Books
War books try to show what history lessons leave out: what it is like to be under fire, to be held prisoner, to lose friends, to live under bombing or to carry a war home afterwards. Some are written by veterans and survivors, others by novelists and reporters who gathered testimony. Readers come to them to understand the past, to make sense of current conflicts, and to see how ordinary people behave in extreme conditions.
This list runs from the First World War to the Arab world today, through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and Vietnam. It mixes novels with memoir, oral history, reportage and biography, and includes soldiers, civilians, prisoners and journalists. For more specific lists, see the site’s pages on women in war and on Holocaust survivors.
Fourteen war books
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 1929
Paul Bäumer and his classmates volunteer for the German army after patriotic speeches from their schoolteacher. On the Western Front they learn to survive shelling, gas and hunger, and Paul kills a French soldier in hand-to-hand combat. On home leave he finds he can no longer talk to civilians, and back at the front his friends die one by one.
Remarque was a German veteran of the war, and the novel is semi-autobiographical. It was among the books burned by the Nazis in 1933. The 1930 American film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and a 2022 German version won four Oscars.
Read it if you want the classic novel of the First World War from the soldier’s side.
Regeneration
Pat Barker · 1991
At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, the army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers treats officers suffering from shell shock. One of them is the poet Siegfried Sassoon, sent there to discredit his public protest against the war. Rivers also treats Billy Prior, a fictional working-class officer who has lost his voice, and watches Sassoon befriend the young Wilfred Owen.
The novel looks at the First World War through its damage to the mind, and at the doctor whose job is to make men fit to be sent back. It opens Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, whose final volume, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995.
Read it if you want a novel about trauma, conscience and the war poets.
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell · 1938
Orwell went to Spain in late 1936 and joined the POUM militia, spending months in the trenches of the Aragon front. On leave in Barcelona in May 1937 he was caught up in street fighting between factions on the Republican side; back at the front, a sniper shot him through the throat, and he and his wife escaped to France after the POUM was outlawed.
Much of the book is about boredom, cold and political betrayal rather than battle. Orwell said the war shaped his politics, and its themes feed into Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It sold poorly in his lifetime.
Read it if you want a first-hand account of war and political infighting from Orwell himself.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl · 1946
The Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl describes his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and what he observed about how prisoners endured or gave up. The second part of the book introduces logotherapy, his approach to psychotherapy based on the search for meaning.
It is one of the most widely read books to come out of the Second World War, with more than 16 million copies sold. Its subject is not combat but what persecution and imprisonment do to people, and what they can still hold on to.
Read it if you want a short book about finding meaning in extreme suffering.
Read my full recommendation →The Choice
Edith Eger · 2017
Edith Eger was 16 when she was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with her family; her mother was murdered there. She survived a death march to Gunskirchen, where US forces liberated her in 1945. Decades later she trained as a clinical psychologist, and the book interweaves her own story with those of patients she has treated.
Where most war books end with liberation, this one follows the long aftermath of trauma. Eger specialised in treating post-traumatic stress, and her central idea is that people cannot always choose what happens to them but can choose how they respond.
Read it if you want a survivor’s story that is as much about healing as about the war.
Read my full recommendation →The Unwomanly Face of War
Svetlana Alexievich · 1985
The Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich collected the testimony of women who served in the Soviet forces during the Second World War, and the book is built from their monologues. The manuscript was held back for two years, and she was accused of pacifism and of debunking the heroic image of the Soviet woman before it was published in 1985; a fuller, less censored edition followed decades later.
It records a side of the war that official histories left out, in the women’s own voices. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, and a new English translation appeared in 2017.
Read it if you want to hear the war from the women who fought it.
Band of Brothers
Stephen E. Ambrose · 1992
The historian Stephen E. Ambrose follows Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, through the Second World War in Europe, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest near Berchtesgaden. He drew on interviews with surviving members of the company.
The book focuses on the men as much as the battles: friendship, leadership and loss within one small unit. It was the basis of the 2001 HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
Read it if you want narrative military history about the soldiers of one company.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961
Captain John Yossarian, a US bombardier on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa during the Second World War, is trying to stay alive and avoid flying more missions. He is defeated by Catch-22: anyone who is crazy can be excused from flying, but asking to be excused proves you are sane.
Heller flew 60 bombing missions himself in 1944. The novel treats war as absurd rather than heroic, and its title has entered the language for any no-win situation. It was filmed in 1970 and adapted as a miniseries in 2019.
Read it if you want a darkly comic novel about the absurdity of war.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969
Billy Pilgrim, an American prisoner of war, survives the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 in a cellar beneath a slaughterhouse. He has also come "unstuck in time", moving between moments of his life, and claims to have been abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who see all of time at once.
Vonnegut was himself a prisoner in Dresden and survived the bombing in a similar cellar, so the novel is semi-autobiographical. It has been repeatedly banned or challenged in American schools, and its refrain "so it goes" follows every death in the book.
Read it if you want an unconventional, anti-war novel that mixes memory and science fiction.
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr · 2014
Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German orphan with a gift for radio technology, grow up on opposite sides of the Second World War. Their stories alternate and converge in the coastal town of Saint-Malo during the American siege of August 1944.
The novel shows the war through civilians and young people rather than generals. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015 and was adapted as a Netflix miniseries in 2023.
Read it if you want a novel of the Second World War told through two young lives.
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · 2005
This biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer follows the physicist from his New York childhood to his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory that built the atomic bomb, and to his later public humiliation, when his security clearance was revoked in the anti-communist climate of the 1950s.
It shows the Second World War from the laboratory rather than the battlefield, and follows the bomb’s consequences into the Cold War. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023).
Read it if you want the story of the scientist behind the atomic bomb.
Read my full recommendation →Hiroshima
John Hersey · 1946
John Hersey follows six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, including a clerk, two doctors, a German Jesuit priest, a widowed seamstress and a Methodist pastor, from the morning of the explosion through the following year. It first appeared in The New Yorker in August 1946, which gave it an entire issue.
Hersey wrote in a deliberately plain style, using the techniques of fiction to tell true stories. A 1999 panel at New York University ranked it the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century. Later editions add a chapter from 1985 revisiting the survivors.
Read it if you want to see the atomic bomb from the ground, through the people it hit.
The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien · 1990
A platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam carry weapons, letters, photographs, fear and guilt. The narrator, also named Tim O’Brien, tells their stories during the war and in the years after, and keeps questioning which details are true and which have been invented to make the story feel true.
Read as both a short-story collection and a novel, it is about how veterans remember and retell war. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Read it if you want a book about the Vietnam War and how soldiers tell its stories.
Our Women on the Ground
Zahra Hankir (editor) · 2019
This anthology, edited by Zahra Hankir with a foreword by Christiane Amanpour, collects essays by nineteen Arab women journalists reporting from across the Arab world. They write about covering the Iraq War, the war and refugee crisis in Syria, and upheaval in Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Palestine and Egypt, often close to home.
It brings the list into the present and shows recent wars through the people who report them. Gender shapes what these reporters can access, from women in Syrian clinics to the restrictions of travelling in Yemen.
Read it if you want recent conflicts seen through the eyes of women journalists.
Read my full recommendation →Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first war novel — All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
- For dark comedy — Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
- For true stories of survival — Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (1946)
- For civilians under bombing — Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946)
- For women’s experiences of war — The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (1985)
- For the Vietnam War — The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is the best war novel of all time?
There is no single answer, but All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is one of the war novels most often cited. Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five are among the best-known American novels of the Second World War.
What are the best non-fiction books about war?
Good starting points are John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War and Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is a first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War.
Which war books are based on the authors’ own experience?
Remarque fought in the First World War, Heller flew 60 bombing missions, Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner and Orwell was wounded in Spain. Viktor Frankl and Edith Eger both survived Auschwitz.
What is a good book about the Vietnam War?
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is one of the most widely read books about the Vietnam War. It is a set of linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers and how they remember the war.
Are there war books written by or about women?
The Unwomanly Face of War collects the testimony of Soviet women who served in the Second World War, and Our Women on the Ground gathers essays by Arab women journalists who report on conflict. The Choice is Edith Eger’s memoir of Auschwitz and its aftermath.
Which war books have been adapted for film or television?
All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Picture in 1930 and four Oscars in a 2022 German version. Band of Brothers became an HBO miniseries, All the Light We Cannot See a Netflix series, and American Prometheus the basis of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
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