12 Powerful War Novels that Transcend War

While detailing the influenza outbreak of Denver in 1918, PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER also conveys the waste and horror of the World War I trenches half a world away. A young, skeptical journalist meets a lieutenant about to ship out overseas, and they decide to navigate the madness of home-front America together.

Winner of the National Book Award, this historical retelling of The Odyssey transplants the classic myth to the American South near the end of the Civil War. A perilous journey across a war-ravaged landscape explores the timeless theme of homecoming at the close of America’s most devastating war.

The Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s is brought to life through the voices of five unforgettable characters. Among them is Ugwu, a houseboy who comes to his master a naive child and ends the novel a wary ex-soldier. As war drags on and the differences between Ugwu and the once-privileged family he serves shrink, their shared, raw humanity is all that remains.

A luminous and savage depiction of post-9/11 America, as experienced by one young war hero attending a Dallas Cowboys game.

To call this a Vietnam novel would be both accurate and far too constraining. Set against the backdrop of the Fall of Saigon, DEMOCRACY chronicles an ill-fated romance and the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Set against the backdrop of tumultuous, war-torn Afghanistan, THE KITE RUNNER is an unforgettable and heartbreaking story of friendship, family, and redemption.

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One young woman’s journey through the savageness and ruin of the Balkans in the 1990s, something that the West tried so hard for too long to ignore.

Beginning with one of literature’s most famous openings—“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.”—Morrison weaves layers and layers of macrohistory into the story of one small all-black town in Oklahoma—including the far-reaching legacy of the Vietnam War.

An evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs, Revolutionary Road is perhaps literature’s most penetrating portrait of the Mad Men era. The story of a couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner, Richard Yates demonstrates with heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity how Frank and April betray not only each other, but their best selves.

Hemingway's first bestselling novel, it is the story of a group of 'Lost Generation' Americans and Brits in the 1920's on a sojourn from Paris to Pamploma, Spain. The novel poignantly details their life as expatriates on Paris' Left Bank, and conveys the brutality of bullfighting in Spain. The novel established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists of all time.

The Booker Prize-winning first book in the brilliant trilogy that examines and skewers the madness of the war by telling as fiction the true story of poet and officer Siegfried Sassoon, who upon declaring he would not fight was sent to a mental hospital for "shell-shocked" soldiers where he was treated by noted psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers. Sassoon's complete sanity disturbs Dr. Rivers to such a point that he questions his own role in "curing" his patients only to send them back to the slaughter of the war. Read the first book and you will have to read the rest.

Set in rural Kentucky more than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, Sam Hughes— the teenage daughter of a soldier who didn’t make it home—seeks out meaning and purpose from the war that took her father.