“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller

by Ford Madox Ford

Fiction. “This is the saddest story,” the narrator notes of his friend Edward Ashburnham’s life. A superb soldier and the perfect English gentleman, Ashburnham has one fatal flaw with regard to affairs of love. Ford weaves a brilliant tale in which nothing is quite what it seems, including the narrator’s telling of the …

by Louisa May Alcott

“Little Women” is one of the best loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remar…

by Henry Adams

As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a family that included two past Presidents, Henry Adams was forever focused on the experiences and expectations unique to America. A prompt bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and his country’s development from 1838…

by C. S. Forester

In this gripping tale of turmoil and triumph on the high seas, Horatio Hornblower emerges from his apprenticeship as midshipman to face new responsibilities thrust upon him by the fortunes of war between Napoleon and Spain. Enduring near-mutiny, bloody hand-to-hand combat with Spanish seamen, deck-splintering sea battle…

by C. S. Forester

The Hornblower Novels of C. S. Forester Mr. Midshipman Hornblower Lieutenant Hornblower Hornblower and the Hotspur Hornblower During the Crisis Hornblower and the Atropos Beat to Quarters Ship of the Line Flying Colours Commodore Hornblower Lord Hornblower Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies Weary of the war that he h…

by Erich Maria Remarque

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against…

by Robert Olmstead

Set in 1916, “Far Bright Star” follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After wit…

by J. G. Farrell

Winner of the booker prize.
India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s “The Siege of Krishnapur,” widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Farre…

by Dan Walsh

Patrick Collins is seven years old, and on his Christmas list are only three items. He wants the army to find his father. He wants to leave his grandfather’s house. And, for reasons even he doesn’t understand, he wants the soldier that’s tucked away in his grandfather’s attic. Set at Christmastime in 1943, The Unfinishe…

by Sebastien Japrisot

Set during and after the First World War, “A Very Long Engagement” tells the story of a young woman’s search for her fiance, whom she believes might still be alive despite having officially been reported as “killed in the line of duty.” Unable to walk since childhood, fearless Mathilde Donnay is undeterred in her quest …

by Herman Wouk

The Novel that Inspired the Now-Classic Film The Caine Mutiny and the Hit Broadway Play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial Herman Wouk’s boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the f…

by Shirley Hazzard

A Great Writer’s Sweeping Story of Men and Women Struggling to Reclaim Their Lives in The Aftermath of World Conflict
"The Great Fire "is Shirley Hazzard’s first novel since “The Transit of Venus,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In wa…

by Philip Caputo

When Vietnam veteran and foreign correspondent Charlie Gage is recruited by the shadowy Thomas Colfax to assist with something called Operation Atropos, he has no idea he is about to be enlisted for guerilla warfare in northeast Africa. Once he realizes he’s a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever s…

by Ian McEwan

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently grad…

by Pat Barker

In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon, 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. Ile was officially classified “mentally unsound” and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William River…

by David Benioff

As wise and funny as it is thrilling and originalathe story of two young men on an impossible adventure
A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother wonat talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is…

by Steven Pressfield

The author of the international bestsellers “Gates of Fire” and “Tides of War” delivers his most gripping and imaginative novel of the ancient world-a stunning epic of love and war that breathes life into the grand myth of the ferocious female warrior culture of the Amazons.
Steven Pressfield has gained a passionate…

by John Knowles

Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, “A Separate Peace” is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, li…

by Ellen Baker

Set in the conformist 1950s and reaching back to span two world wars, Ellen Baker’s superb novel is the story of a newlywed who falls in love with a grand abandoned house and begins to unravel dark secrets woven through the generations of a family. Like Whitney Otto’s "How to Make an American Quilt "in its intimate port…

by Sarah Waters

From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past.
In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family …

by Ken Follett

In a time of civil war, famine and religious strife, there rises a magnificent Cathedral in Kingsbridge. Against this backdrop, lives entwine: Tom, the master builder, Aliena, the noblewoman, Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge, Jack, the artist in stone and Ellen, the woman from the forest who casts a curse. At once, this…

by Ross Lockridge

Throughout a single day in 1892, John Shawnessy recalls the great moments of his life—from the love affairs of his youth in Indiana, to the battles of the Civil War, to the politics of the Gilded Age, to his homecoming as schoolteacher, husband, and father. Shawnessy is the epitome of the place and period in which he l…

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

An ambitious and startling debut novel that follows the lives of four women at a resort popular among slaveholders who bring their enslaved mistresses

wench \’wench\ “n.” from Middle English ""wenchel,"" 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American res…

by Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by “Time” as “brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times,” “A Dance to the Music of Time” opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s…

by Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as “brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times,” A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Ni…

by Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as “brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times,” A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Ni…

by Scott Turow

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he’d been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart’s mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father’s death, a packet of wartime lett…

by James Patrick Donleavy

First published in Paris in 1955, and originally banned in the United States, J. P. Donleavy’s first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavys wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the m…

by Joe Buff

In his latest mission, Commander Jeffrey Fuller will go head-to-head against his most dangerous adversary yet – his own allies.

Jeffrey Fuller has a new mission – use his cutting-edge submarine Challenger to recover a German spy claiming to have key information about the Berlin-Boer Axis, information that could be…

by Jeremy Robinson

HOW MANY PEOPLE WOULD YOU KILL TO LIVE FOREVER?
Imagine a world where soldiers regenerate and continue fighting without pause, where suicide bombers live to strike again and again. This is the dream of Richard Ridley, founder of Manifold Genetics, and he has just discovered the key to eternal life: an ancient art…