When was the last time you read a literary novel about war? Perhaps it’s been a while. And if that’s the case, now might be the right time to dive into one. Novels about soldiers fighting wars – and the impact of violent conflict on individuals and families long after the fighting has ceased – are a genre unto themselves. With Veterans Day approaching, November is the ideal month to give these books a fresh look. Here are some of the best novels, short story and poetry books about war, soldiers and the aftermath of conflict for adults to read this year to honor Veterans Day.
contemporary novels and books of poetry to honor the spirit of veterans day
Veterans Day is celebrated in the U.S. on November 11 each year to mark the end of World War One. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare during the First World War.
In London, Armistice Day – also known as Remembrance Day or sometimes Poppy Day – is also commemorated on November 11th.
That makes this a good time to take a fresh look at the literature of war and its aftermath.
What are the best novels and poetry books for adults to read this year in honor of Armistice or Veterans Day? Lapel Poppies worn to commemorate Remembrance Day in the UK.
war novels and poems are often assigned reading only
Several post-World War II novelists like Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Wouk, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, Kevin Powers and others are on assigned reading lists in high school and college. However, after graduation, there are plenty of avid literary fiction readers who haven’t voluntarily picked up any of these books since.
Why is that?
Well, if you’re like us, you might instinctively turn away from novels about war and soldiers, convinced that they’re too violent, too macho, too celebratory of conquest, and lacking in nuance – blunt objects that won’t engage us the way other novels do.
Dear reader, we urge you to reconsider.
why read a novel or poetry collection to honor Veterans Day this year?
It is often said that reading fiction is a way to understand The Other – to get inside of the heads – or shoes, or psyches – of people who are unlike us.
We believe that. And as Veterans Day approaches, we have been reading novels that deliver a visceral sense of the toll of war at the human level. Particularly from the point of view of soldiers.
What are the best novels and poetry books for adults to read in honor of Armistice or Veterans Day? Armistice Day commemorative statue in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London. Photo Credit: Dandelion Chandelier.
We’ve never served in the military, but we know many people who have (and still are). Reading the daily paper or cracking open a military memoir or autobiography can take us part of the way to understanding and empathizing with our fellow citizens in the armed forces.
But the best war fiction somehow makes us experience their trials, challenges, triumphs and enduring wounds at a much deeper level than even the most riveting non-fiction.
The best novels and poetry books about war and soldiers and the aftermath of conflict for adults to read this year to honor Armistice or Veterans Day. The Tower of London Armistice Day commemoration 2014. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.
are there novels and books of poetry about soldiers and war that are by and about women?
Until recently, women were not allowed to fully serve in the armed forces of many countries (although there are some notable exceptions). So for quite some time, the literature of war was written by men, mostly about men, and it felt as if those books were meant to be read primarily by men.
Even now, women’s voices in the fiction of war are quite often heard through protagonists who are spies, or who volunteered to be a part of the Resistance, or who played non-combatant roles like code crackers and nurses.
In recent years, though, as more women serve in combat roles and more women writers publish works that tell their stories, there are excellent novels by and about women in this genre. We’ve added a number of them to our list, below.
classic fiction is a good way to get started
If you want to dip into the literature of war, you could reach for one of the “modern classic” war novels. You could pick up The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Or All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
But if you want a more recent take from a wider range of voices and experiences, here’s our suggested list of literary novels written in the voices of soldiers, combatants and non-coms. Some of these are about involuntary warriors. All of them are about those who have returned from war, or who are on leave from it, and the impact that violent combat has on them and their families and loved ones.
The best novels and poetry collections about war and soldiers and the aftermath of conflict for adults to read this year to honor Armistice or Veterans Day. The Tower of London 2018. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.
Whether you reach for a novel that’s vintage, or one that’s fresh from the publisher, for satire or something deadly serious, it’s possible that reading one or more of these will make Veterans Day a more profound experience for you this year. We hope it will.
19 best novels and books of poetry about war for adults to read in honor of Veterans Day
1. Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman.
In Waiting for Eden, the title character Eden Malcom lies in a hospital bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friends and fellow soldiers who didn’t make it back home after the attack that has left him shattered. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his life before leaving for the war come to the surface, causing him to question whether he can ever again be the same man that he once was.
2. Night Train: New and Collected Stories by Thom Jones.
The collection of selected short stories Night Train presents a vibrant cast of deeply damaged protagonists, some suffering from traumas endured on the battlefields of Vietnam. In a recent review, the Wall Street Journal book critic Sam Sacks (who has impeccable taste in fiction) wrote: “there are moments in Jones’s stories . . . where the writing seems capable of transcending the forces of destruction it so unforgettably evokes.”
3. The People of Forever are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu.
The People of Forever are Not Afraid is the tale of three teenagers’ experiences in the Israeli Defense Forces. Yael, Avishag, and Lea grew up together in a tiny, dusty Israeli village. When they are conscripted into the army, their lives change in unpredictable ways, influencing the women they become.
4. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky.
A bestselling Jewish author living in Paris, Némirovsky finished writing Suite Française (actually, two distinct novels out of a planned series of 5) just months before being sent to Auschwitz, where she later died. This book was first published six decades after her death. It provides a riveting account of life in occupied Paris.
5. Flashes of War by Katey Schultz.
In the short story collection Flashes of War, the award-winning author shares tales of struggles by a wide range of people touched by conflict. Among them? A returning U.S. soldier. An Afghan mother. A courageous amputee. And a ghost who cannot let go. This vibrant collection illuminates the moments of fear, introspection, confusion, and valor that are endemic to armed conflict no matter where in the world it takes place.
6. Cherry by Nico Walker.
In the semi-autobiographical novel Cherry, an Iraq veteran turns to robbing banks in order to fund the heroin addiction consuming him and his wife. It’s based on the author’s own story of a journey from army medic to criminal. The author was sentenced to 11 years in prison. And the novel is being developed for a feature film.
7. You Know When the Men are Gone by Siobhan Fallon.
In You Know When the Men are Gone, a collection of interconnected stories, an army of women are waiting at Fort Hood, Texas for their men to return from combat. Through a series of loosely interconnected stories, Fallon takes readers onto the base, inside their homes, into their marriages and families. These are the intimate places not commonly seen in news coverage. These glimpses behind the scenes bring new meaning to the sign above the gate that one sees when leaving Fort Hood: You’ve Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming.
8. Be Safe, I Love You by Cara Hoffman.
The novel Be Safe, I Love You is about a young woman soldier who returns from Iraq haunted by a tragic mistake was named one of the 5 Best in Modern War Fiction by The Sunday Telegraph. Before she enlisted, classically-trained singer Lauren Clay had been accepted to a prestigious music conservatory, but her family’s financial demands pushed her into joining the army. Her younger brother Danny signs his quirky, heartfelt letters to her “be safe, I love you.” It’s only when she returns home that her family realizes the steep price this soldier has paid with her service.
9. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and described as “The Catch-22 of the Iraq War,” the debut novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a satire set in Texas. The work explores the national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. It’s the story of the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad and their experiences on one exhausting stop in their media-intensive “Victory Tour” at Texas Stadium, one of football’s iconic meccas and home of the Dallas Cowboys.
10. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.
The Yellow Birds has become an instant classic in the genre of novels about war and soldiers that makes for a poignant read in honor of Veteran’s Day. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training – when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home – the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.
11. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
Spanning three generations between the First World War and the present, the novel Birdsong traces the life of young Englishman Stephen Wraysford. He passes through a tempestuous love affair with an unhappily married woman in Amiens, France in 1910. Haunted by the outcome of this doomed affair, he carries the memory of it with him into the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land in World War I.
12. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.
In the Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, four damaged survivors find themselves thrown together at a villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to re-imagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe. And at the center lies the English patient, a man nameless and hideously burned, a riddle and a provocation to his companions. Many of the scenes in this tale will stay imprinted in your memory. And you may have seen the movie – but you need to read the book.
13. Regeneration by Pat Barker.
In 1917, Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified “mentally unsound” and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon’s “sanity” and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. Its the first of a trilogy of novels about the war and its psychological effects. The third installment, The Ghost Road, won the Booker prize in 1995.
14. The Hunters by James Salter.
Based on the author’s experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, this novel was originally published in 1956, and re-released in 2012. Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea to fly a newly operational F-86 fighter against Soviet MIGs. His goal is to become an ace. But his missions prove fruitless, and disappointment and fear take over. It takes a dramatic mission above the Yalu River to reveal the depth of the pilot’s courage.
15. Redeployment by Phil Klay.
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, set on the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this collection of short stories is a mediation on “brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival.” Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extreme aggression and the other of senseless loss.
16. Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird.
Though born into bondage in Missouri before the Civil War, Cathy Williams was never allowed to consider herself a slave. According to her mother, she was a captive, destined by her noble warrior blood to escape the enemy. When Union general Phillip Henry Sheridan, an outcast from West Point, presents her with a chance at freedom, she takes it. At war’s end, she makes the stunning decision to disguise herself as a man and join the Army’s legendary Buffalo Soldiers, the African-American regiments formed in 1866, becoming the first woman ever to serve as a soldier in the peacetime Army.
17. Sand Queen by Helene Benedict.
In the novel Sand Queen, nineteen-year-old Kate Brady has joined the army to bring honor to her family. Instead, she finds herself in a forgotten corner of the Iraq desert in 2003, guarding a makeshift American prison. She befriends a female Iraqi medical student whose family has been detained at the camp. The two forge an alliance, but it is soon strained by war. The American soldier is in equal danger from the enemy and the predatory men in her unit. The Iraqi civilian suffers from starvation and the loss of her home and family. Each comes to have a drastic and unforeseeable effect on the other’s life.
18. Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson.
Based on a true story, the novel of wartime Never Anyone But You begins in the years preceding World War I, when two young women meet, by chance, in a provincial town in France. They embark on a clandestine love affair, and ultimately move to Paris. Having reinvented themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, they move in glamorous circles, meeting everyone from Hemingway and Dalí to André Breton, and produce provocative photographs that still seem avant-garde today. In the 1930’s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and the threat of fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, and it is on this idyllic island that they confront their destiny, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler’s occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy.
19. Ohio by Stephen Markley.
Set in an archetypal small town in northeastern Ohio—a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the debut novel Ohio depicts one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013 when four former classmates (one a veteran of three tours in Iraq) converge on their hometown – each with a specific goal and all haunted by their experiences as part of a generation that has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity.
Novels and poetry collections for adults to read in Honor of Veterans Day
Those are our picks for the novels and poetry collections that are among the best for adults to read to honor Veterans Day this year.
Can novels and poetry collections really affect change? We’d like to think so. Even if it’s just change inside of each of us – or even better, change and deepen the connections between and among us. That would be a worthy task to undertake this Veterans Day.
