Themes
Books About War
Novels and nonfiction that reckon with war — its causes, costs and long aftermath.
20 books · ranked
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1
The Hobbit
A comfortable hobbit is swept into an adventure with dwarves and a dragon; the cosy doorway into Middle-earth.
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2
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.
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3
Watchmen
Flawed, ageing superheroes in an alternate Cold War; the graphic novel that proved comics could be literature.
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4
Brave New World
A future engineered for comfort and conformity; the other great dystopia, warning against pleasure rather than fear.
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5
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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6
The Lord of the Rings
A small hobbit carries a world-ending ring toward the only place it can be destroyed; the epic that defined the genre.
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7
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Great Migration of Black Americans told through three unforgettable lives; monumental narrative history.
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8
Guards! Guards!
A drunken night watch must stop a dragon and a conspiracy; warm, funny and secretly wise Discworld.
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9
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.
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10
Slaughterhouse-Five
A man comes 'unstuck in time' after surviving the firebombing of Dresden; an anti-war novel like no other.
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11
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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12
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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13
Northern Lights
A girl and her animal soul-companion journey north into a war over the nature of the soul; thrilling and profound.
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14
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Four children step through a wardrobe into a frozen magic kingdom; the gateway to Narnia.
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15
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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16
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.
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17
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Alec Leamas, a burned-out British intelligence officer, is sent on one final mission into East Germany — supposedly to destroy an East German spymaster. Le Carré's breakthrough novel dismantled the romantic myth of the Cold War spy and replaced it with a portrait of moral compromise, institutional cynicism and the expendability of individuals to state interests.
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18
The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy brings Essun and her daughter Nassun toward an inevitable confrontation over the fate of a world wracked by recurring apocalypses — and reveals the deep history of the Stillness and the Obelisk Gate. Jemisin's trilogy made history as the only series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, with this final volume completing one of the most acclaimed achievements in contemporary fantasy.
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19
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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20
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography follows Malcolm's journey from a troubled childhood in Michigan through criminal activity, prison, conversion to Islam and transformation into one of America's most electrifying and controversial political figures — ending with his shift toward a more universal view of human rights before his assassination in 1965.