The Great War - WWI (various fictions)
Explore the definitive WWI fiction reading list featuring classics like All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and Birdsong. From Hemingway’s poignant tales to Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, discover powerful historical novels, mysteries, and gripping war stories that capture the harrowing truths of the Great War.
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The First Casualty
by Ben Elton
Flanders, June 1917: A British Officer And Celebrated Poet, Is Shot Dead, Killed Not By German Fire, But While Recuperating From Shell Shock Well Behind The Lines. A Young English Soldier Is Arrested And, Although He Protests His Innocence, Charged With His Murder.Douglas Kingsley Is A Conscientious Objector, Previously A Detective With The London Police, Now Imprisoned For His Beliefs. He Is Released And Sent To France In Order To Secure A Conviction. Forced To Conduct His Investigations Amidst The Hell Of The Third Battle Of Ypres, Kingsley Soon Discovers That Both The Evidence And The Witnesses He Needs Are Quite Literally Disappearing Into The Mud That Surrounds Him.Ben Elton'S Tenth Novel Is A Gut-Wrenching Historical Drama Which Explores Some Fundamental Questions. What Is Murder? What Is Justice In The Face Of Unimaginable Daily Slaughter? And Where Is The Honour In Saving A Man From The Gallows If He Is Only To Be Returned To Die In A Suicidal Battle?As The Gap Between Legally-Sanctioned And Illegal Murder Becomes Evermore Blurred, Kingsley Quickly Learns That The First Casualty When War Comes Is Truth.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix. “[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.”—The New York Times Book Review I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
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Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A mesmerising story of love and war spanning three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the 1990s In this "overpowering and beautiful novel" (The New Yorker), the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land. Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient, crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.
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Regeneration Trilogy
by Pat Barker
This box set contains Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. The Eye in the Door won the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize and The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experience came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer, and the men and women he meets in Italy, with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.
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War Story
by Derek Robinson
¿Derek Robinson does for the Royal Flying Corps what the War Poets did for frontline soldiers¿ ¿ Daily Telegraph ¿Beneath the insolent wit and ludicrous happenings is a novel essentially serious, whose full impact may be felt only in afterthought¿ ¿ Sunday Times ¿The descriptions of patrolling and aerial combat are superlatively well done¿Stronger tastes will relish the whiff of battiness and brimstone.¿ ¿ Times Literary Supplement Written by the Booker nominated author, Derek Robinson.
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To the Last Man
by Jeff Shaara
Jeff Shaara has enthralled readers with his New York Times bestselling novels set during the Civil War and the American Revolution. Now the acclaimed author turns to World War I, bringing to life the sweeping, emotional story of the war that devastated a generation and established America as a world power. Spring 1916: the horror of a stalemate on Europe’s western front. France and Great Britain are on one side of the barbed wire, a fierce German army is on the other. Shaara opens the window onto the otherworldly tableau of trench warfare as seen through the eyes of a typical British soldier who experiences the bizarre and the horrible–a “Tommy” whose innocent youth is cast into the hell of a terrifying war. In the skies, meanwhile, technology has provided a devastating new tool, the aeroplane, and with it a different kind of hero emerges–the flying ace. Soaring high above the chaos on the ground, these solitary knights duel in the splendor and terror of the skies, their courage and steel tested with every flight. As the conflict stretches into its third year, a neutral America is goaded into war, its reluctant president, Woodrow Wilson, finally accepting the repeated challenges to his stance of nonalignment. Yet the Americans are woefully unprepared and ill equipped to enter a war that has become worldwide in scope. The responsibility is placed on the shoulders of General John “Blackjack” Pershing, and by mid-1917 the first wave of the American Expeditionary Force arrives in Europe. Encouraged by the bold spirit and strength of the untested Americans, the world waits to see if the tide of war can finally be turned. From Blackjack Pershing to the Marine in the trenches, from the Red Baron to the American pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, To the Last Man is written with the moving vividness and accuracy that characterizes all of Shaara’s work. This spellbinding new novel carries readers–the way only Shaara can–to the heart of one of the greatest conflicts in human history, and puts them face-to-face with the characters who made a lasting impact on the world.
