War & Conflict

1

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.

Germany 1929

2

The Tin Drum

Günter Grass

Oskar Matzerath, who decides at age three to stop growing, narrates the history of Danzig and Germany through the Nazi era from his bed in a psychiatric hospital. The opening novel of Grass's Danzig Trilogy won the Nobel Prize.

Germany 1959

3

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.

Nigeria 2006

4

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.

United States 1985

5

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

American lieutenant Frederic Henry serves as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I and falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley. A classic anti-war novel that draws on Hemingway's own wartime experiences.

United States 1929

6

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.

United States 1940

7

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.

Russia 1869