Life and Fate
1980 · 896 pages
During the siege of Stalingrad, a Soviet physicist receives his mother's last letter from a Nazi ghetto. Grossman wrote the war at Tolstoy's scale and said plainly that both tyrannies were one thing.
★ 8.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
All Quiet on the Western Front
1928 · 304 pages
German schoolboys enlist after a teacher's patriotic speech and find mud, lice, and men dying badly. Remarque was in those trenches, and no book has done more damage to the idea of glory.
★ 8.0
A Farewell to Arms
1929 · 332 pages
Driving ambulances for the Italian army, an American falls in love with an English nurse while the front collapses around them. Hemingway's plain sentences leave you completely undefended by the last page.
★ 8.0
The Things They Carried
1990 · 256 pages
O'Brien lists what a platoon in Vietnam hauled around, down to the ounce, then tells war stories and takes them back. The invented ones carry the war more exactly than facts could.
★ 7.8
Parade's End
1928 · 906 pages
Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician called the last Tory, endures a wife bent on ruining him and a war in France that takes apart the England he was raised to defend.
★ 7.0
The Quiet American
1955 · 180 pages
Greene put a British correspondent and an idealistic young American in Saigon, fighting over the same woman and over a theory. He saw the American war in Vietnam a decade before it started.
★ 6.7
From Here to Eternity
1951 · 864 pages
Still the fullest American novel of army life. Private Prewitt refuses to box for his company and the army sets about breaking him, on a Hawaii post months before Pearl Harbor.
★ 6.7
The Naked and the Dead
1948 · 736 pages
America's novel of the Second World War, published when Mailer was twenty-five and just back from the Philippines. A reconnaissance platoon crosses a Japanese-held island while he tracks every man's fear.
★ 6.5
The Sorrow of War
A Novel of North Vietnam
1991 · 240 pages
Kien spends the peace gathering the dead from the jungle that swallowed his battalion, and the war returns out of sequence. Bao Ninh enlisted at seventeen among five hundred, and ten came home.
★ 5.7
The Gallery
1947 · 342 pages
Occupied Naples, 1944: soldiers and civilians trading cigarettes, sex, and rumor under the arcade. Burns writes Americans who understand nothing of the country they hold, and a bar where gay soldiers breathe.
★ 5.2