War & Revolution in Literature

1

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

An epic account of Russian society during Napoleon's 1812 invasion, following five aristocratic families across fifteen years of war, peace, love, and death. One of the longest and most celebrated novels in world literature.

1869 Russia

2

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A single day in the life of a prisoner in a Stalinist labour camp, rendered with minute, unflinching detail. Its 1962 publication in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir was a landmark event in the cultural thaw.

1962 Russia

3

1984

George Orwell

Winston Smith works for the Party rewriting history in a totalitarian superstate called Oceania. His secret rebellion and doomed love affair with Julia end in the Ministry of Love. The novel gave the world "Big Brother," "doublethink," and "Newspeak."

1949 United Kingdom

4

Animal Farm

George Orwell

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer, only to find the pigs gradually becoming indistinguishable from their former oppressors. A precise allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalinist betrayal.

1945 United Kingdom

5

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

An American volunteer fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War spends three days behind enemy lines preparing to blow up a bridge. One of Hemingway's longest and most politically engaged novels.

1940 United States

6

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

A teenage runaway joins a historical band of scalp hunters marauding through the US-Mexico borderlands in the 1850s. McCarthy's most celebrated and most violent novel is a meditation on war, evil, and the nature of violence in human history.

1985 United States

7

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

Okonkwo, a respected warrior in the Igbo village of Umuofia, sees his world dismantled by the arrival of European missionaries and colonial administrators. The novel has sold over 20 million copies and is taught in schools across the world.

1958 Nigeria

8

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The lives of three characters intersect during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s — a war that resulted in the deaths of up to three million people, many from starvation. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction.

2006 Nigeria

9

All Quiet on the Western Front

Thomas Mann

German soldier Paul Bäumer narrates his experiences in the trenches of World War I, watching his classmates die one by one. Mann's pacifist novel was banned and burned by the Nazis; it sold over 2.5 million copies in its first year.

1929 Germany

10

Germinal

Gustave Flaubert

Étienne Lantier arrives at a northern French coal mine and organises the exploited miners in a strike that ends in catastrophe. The thirteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle and his most powerful political work.

1885 France