Best War Fiction Books

Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, flees from his first battle and spends a day wrestling with cowardice and shame before returning to fight. Crane had never witnessed combat when he wrote this novel — yet his hallucinatory, impressionistic account of a single soldier's experience in the American Civil War remains the most psychologically honest war novel ever written by an American.

Five families from England, Germany, Russia, America, and Wales are swept up in the cataclysm of World War One and the Russian Revolution. Follett's Century Trilogy opens with his most ambitious canvas yet — a panoramic story of the early twentieth century told through interconnected lives across five nations.

Polly Perks disguises herself as a boy to join the army and find her missing brother. Her regiment — the last hope of a small nation losing a war — is full of soldiers who seem to be hiding their own secrets. Pratchett's most overtly political Discworld novel takes on war, religion, patriotism, and gender with characteristic wit.

John Clark — the CIA field operative who has appeared across Clancy's Jack Ryan universe — is given command of Rainbow, a multinational counter-terrorism unit. When a series of hostage situations reveals a larger conspiracy involving bioterrorism and corporate eco-extremism, Rainbow must stop a plot aimed at reducing the human population.

The second novel of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. London, 1918: Billy Prior, recovered enough to return to intelligence work, is caught between his duties and his sympathies as the state turns on pacifists and homosexuals, while Dr. Rivers treats minds the war has split.

Palestinian terrorists acquire a nuclear device and plant it at the Super Bowl. CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan must identify the threat and prevent detonation while the world's superpowers are being manipulated toward confrontation. Clancy's most complex thriller works across multiple continents, governments, and ideologies simultaneously.

A German soldier on the Eastern Front is given three weeks' leave, returns to his bombed city, falls in love, marries, and must return to the front. Remarque's most compassionate novel about the Second World War gives a German protagonist genuine humanity in a story almost no fiction had attempted: the ordinary German soldier who is neither hero nor monster, simply a man caught in what his country has done.

John Tyree is a soldier on leave when he meets Savannah Curtis during a summer on the Carolina coast. Their brief romance deepens through years of letters — until the world changes and the letters stop coming. A love story about what happens when duty and desire pull in opposite directions.

While vacationing in London, CIA analyst Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales and becomes the target of a vengeful splinter faction determined to kill him and his family on American soil.

Norman Mailer's monumental debut, drawn from his service in the Pacific. Following an army platoon during the invasion of a Japanese-held island, the novel renders the brutality, boredom, and power struggles of war while probing the authoritarian impulses lurking within the American character.

The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving soldiers as they return to a Germany that has changed beyond recognition — where their sacrifice is simultaneously celebrated and disregarded, and where the civilian world has no framework for what they have seen. Remarque's second novel asks what happens after the war ends: harder to read and less celebrated than its predecessor, but in some ways more honest.

A young Scottish woman goes to occupied France during World War II ostensibly to find her missing RAF boyfriend, but discovers more about herself and the French under occupation than she expected. The third volume of Faulks's loose French trilogy, following Birdsong.

In a mobile army surgical hospital near the front lines of the Korean War, a team of brilliant surgeons maintain their sanity through elaborate pranks, outrageous insubordination, and black humor in the face of relentless carnage.

Two Australian sisters — Naomi and Sally Durance — both nurses, leave the family farm at the outbreak of World War I and serve at Gallipoli, on hospital ships, and on the Western Front, each carrying a secret from their last night at home.