16 Best War Novels, Ordered by How Close They Stand

Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist because a schoolmaster tells them it is the honourable thing, and within weeks the honour has been replaced by lice, shellfire, and the arithmetic of who is still alive at breakfast. Remarque was there, and it shows in the small things: the quarrel over a dead friend's boots, the way a rumour about extra rations matters more than any general's plan. The famous scene, where Paul shares a shell hole with a man he has just stabbed, still does exactly what it did in 1929. It refuses to let the enemy stay a stranger.

O'Brien served in Vietnam and then spent two decades writing around it. These are linked stories about a single platoon: what each man hauls in his pack, who dies and how the survivors rearrange the death into something they can repeat at a bar, and a narrator called Tim O'Brien who keeps admitting he invented parts of it. That sounds like a gimmick until you read it. The lying is the argument he is making. He is showing you how memory edits a war down to a size a person can keep carrying.

Marlantes fought as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam and worked on this novel for decades, which you can feel in its density. A young officer arrives to lead a company building a firebase on a hill near the demilitarised zone, and the book stays with them through leeches, jungle rot, racial fault lines inside the platoon, supplies that do not arrive, and orders that make sense only to someone far away with a map. It is the most procedural book on this list. You come out knowing how a company eats, digs, argues, and dies.

Kien survives ten years of fighting and ends up in a unit gathering bodies from a jungle where most of his platoon died. The novel moves the way a damaged memory moves, forward into a scene, sideways into a childhood, back into one night that will not close, circling a love story the war ate. Bao Ninh fought in a brigade that was almost wiped out, and this is the book that answers the American shelf. The official reception at home was cold for years, which tells you it is not propaganda in either direction.

Klay served as a Marine officer in Anbar, and his stories move around the war rather than straight through it. A man who shot dogs on deployment now has to make a decision about his own dog at home. A chaplain loses his footing. A mortuary affairs clerk keeps count. A foreign service officer tries to fund a baseball programme in a province with no interest in baseball. The voice changes completely from story to story, and the funniest pieces are also the ugliest, which is a hard trick to land and he lands it more than once.

Frederic Henry drives ambulances for the Italian army, gets badly hit, falls in love with a nurse named Catherine Barkley, and eventually walks away from the whole business during a retreat. Hemingway did drive ambulances in Italy and was wounded there, and the retreat chapters are the best thing in the book: rain, mud, jammed roads, officers shooting other officers for the crime of having lost their units. The love story has aged less kindly. Catherine can read as a wish rather than a person, and I would rather say that than pretend the book is flawless.

Yossarian wants to stay alive, which everyone around him treats as the one unreasonable position available. The rule of the title holds that a man who asks to be grounded for insanity has proved his sanity by asking, so the required number of missions keeps rising and an entire economy of colonels, syndicates and paperwork grows around that joke. Heller flew sixty missions as a bombardier. The novel is very funny for a long stretch and then stops being funny in one specific chapter, and that chapter is why people file it under war rather than comedy.

Billy Pilgrim is captured in the Ardennes, held in a Dresden slaughterhouse, and survives the firebombing in a meat locker, which is precisely what happened to Vonnegut. The book keeps sliding off that night into aliens, a zoo on another planet, and a chapter about the author's own failed attempts to write the thing straight. The sliding is the point. He spent over twenty years unable to tell it directly, so he published the failure instead, and the short phrase he repeats after every death does more work than most novels manage in a chapter.

The narrator is a captain of two minds about everything, half Vietnamese and half French, reporting to the North while serving as aide to a South Vietnamese general in exile. The book opens with the evacuation of Saigon, moves into refugee California, detours onto a Hollywood set where an American director shoots a Vietnam epic using Vietnamese extras as scenery, and then turns very dark in its final section. The comedy is real and the anger beneath it is real, and the argument running under both is about who gets to narrate a war.

Craiglockhart hospital, 1917. W. H. R. Rivers treats officers suffering from what was then called shell shock, among them Siegfried Sassoon, who has just published a public declaration against continuing the war, and Wilfred Owen, who is about to write the poems everyone quotes on Remembrance Day. Barker keeps the medicine specific, the stammers, the mutism, the nightmares that repeat one image, and lets the ethical problem stand in plain view: this doctor's job is to make broken men well enough to be broken again.

Mailer served in the Philippines and wrote this almost immediately afterwards, in his twenties, which gives it a rawness the later classics sand away. A reconnaissance platoon is sent on a near-pointless patrol across a Japanese-held island while, above them, a general and his lieutenant argue about power, fear, and what men are for. Mailer keeps stopping the story for flashbacks that hand each soldier a full American life before the war, so the platoon becomes a cross section of a country. It is long, uneven, and full of the prejudices of the men it records.

Grossman covered Stalingrad for a Soviet army newspaper and was among the first journalists to write about an extermination camp, and after the war he put everything he knew into a novel the state seized. It follows one extended family across the battle, the physics institutes, the camps on both sides, and a long chain of ordinary decisions about who to inform on and who to protect. There is a letter from a mother inside a Jewish ghetto that I will not describe, because describing it does it damage. The book argues, calmly and at length, that the two systems fighting each other had started to resemble one another.

The novel opens in the early 1960s with a university town, servants, affairs and dinner-table politics, and it takes its time, because Adichie wants you comfortable before the coups, the killings and the blockade arrive. Then a region secedes, a war begins, and the same characters are measuring out garri and burying people they love. Ugwu, the teenage houseboy, is the spine of the book. Adichie has written that both her grandfathers died in that war, and the novel carries the weight of a story told at home long before it was written down.

Rehana Haque is a widow with two grown children who join the fight for Bangladeshi independence, and the war reaches her in the most domestic way possible: a guerrilla hidden in the garden, a son who stops coming home, a daughter who has stopped asking permission. Anam comes from a family that lived through that year, and she writes the war as a sequence of household decisions, what to cook, what to bury, who to lie to at the gate. The politics of 1971 sit in the background, roughly where a mother would keep them.

The first part follows a set of Parisians on the roads out of the city in June 1940, snobs and clerks and a self-satisfied writer, all of them behaving about as badly as you would expect. The second settles into a village where German officers are billeted in French homes and something like an attraction grows between a soldier and the woman whose house he lives in. Némirovsky wrote this in a notebook as the events happened, before she was deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1942. Her daughter kept the manuscript for decades without reading it.

Karnad grew up with photographs of three relatives who died in the Second World War and reconstructs their lives from letters, service records and the places themselves: an engineer, an air force pilot, a doctor. Around them he tells the larger story of the roughly two and a half million Indians who served, the retreat from Burma, the famine in Bengal, and the awkward arithmetic of an army fighting for an empire that was ruling its own soldiers' country. It reads like a novel and is sourced like history, and the last section is quietly furious.