Three War Novels and Two Non-Fiction War Books to Read
02.06.2026
Since The Guardian, the much-deteriorated UK newspaper, has published its list of 100 Best Novels of All Times, of which I can guarantee 67 are memorable enough for me to tick them off their list, I thought it was a moment to guide people towards best “war novels” I have read. More precisely, best anti-war novels I have read, in my haphazard meandering through books. Only one my three selected novels was on the original Guardian list, and another was added afterwards as a “readers’ favourite”. One of my best three was notably absent from The Guardian’s list altogether. And then I also suggest two non-fiction books. Please add your favourite anti-war novels and anti-war non-fiction books!
So here are my two lists. My aim is to give a list of five books for our “LALIT readers” to read. This way, we cope more easily in these times of war and genocide that we live in. All oppose war by exposing it.
My first choice is the masterpiece of all novels: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
It is as easy to read as a comic cartoon book. If you have been up to Sizyem at school in Mauritius, you can read it. The less formal education you have, the easier you will find it to read. This is because you may not know that the structure of the book is unusual, and might find it perfectly natural. Anyway, it is an easy read.
Yet it is the most profound book I have ever read that was written about war, or even about modern capitalist society. And it is therefore the most difficult of books to process. It took Kurt Vonnegut over 20 years to process enough of what he went through in the war to be able to write this gem of a book.
First published only in 1969, it is by a survivor of the fire-bombing by the USA and UK of the peaceful German city of Dresden that he experienced in 1945, right at the very end of the Second World War.
Yes, Vonnegut was an eye-witness. He and other prisoners-of-war survived only because, while under forced labour, they were locked up at night in an underground, sealed abattoir called, in German, “Slaughter-House Five”. When they emerged afterwards, everyone and everything was destroyed. People were all burnt alive. Some were boiled alive.
And yes, his memories took over 20 years to be able to be processed into this beautiful little book. Please read it. You will laugh and laugh, with tears in your eyes from both the laughter and the horror. It leaves you with relief at having gone through and survived such an experience, yourself – just be reading about it. What the ancient Greeks called “catharsis”.
The book, only 200 ever-so-easy-to-read pages, will take you a while, as I say, to process, too, each little section by each little section. The book is also, in its way, about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as “shell-shock” is now called.
It is one of the greatest gifts to humanity left by this socialist humanist, who described himself as a man without a country. He was American.
This one of his books was added to the Guardian’s 100 best novels on popular demand. Another one of his novels was already on their list. I have read all his novels, and even one by a character in his novels!
Vonnegut has lots of fans in Mauritius. Rex Stephen was one. He and I always joked about writing a letter to Vonnegut, when the writer was still alive, in the name of his “Mauritius fan club”. It is one of my regrets that we never did it. Both Kurt Vonnegut and Rex Stephen died while we procrastinated. So, it goes, as Vonnegut would have said.
My second choice is War and Peace by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, which The Guardian has in 7th or so place. The version I have is in three volumes and is over 450 pages. It is a very different read. It came out 100 years before Vonnegut’s novel. It was published as a serial, like a TV or Netflix serial. That was from 1865-67. I read it first when I was 20, and remembered it vividly from then on. But, it was only when, during the Covid lock-down that I picked it up and re-read all three volumes in one excited rush, that I realized that this book, more than any other book, had somehow molded my moral universe. Tolstoy does not set out to give any moral lessons, but the long, rambling novel does draw huge moral conclusions about the importance of the effects on others of your actions. And the importance of taking wise decisions, given what the luck of history and the luck of your personal fate has already handed to you. I had never realized how formative the novel had been, until six years ago. So, read it in installments – remembering it was written in installments!
My third choice amongst novels is called Gravity’s Rainbow, and it’s by Thomas Pynchon. This one, published in 1973, is an erudite read but, more difficult still than its erudition, is that it is tough because it forces you to watch the beginnings of what we now see as the “Epstein class”. We experience the very centre of that dark place, where the military industrial capitalist “complex” as US President Dwight Eisenhower called it in his 1961 farewell address, meets the secret service spies, during the formative, very dark world of Post-World War II’s scramble to plunder German science and technology from the ruins of the bombing and shelling, while “running” left over Nazi rings and drug rings and prostitute rings. It is about the pillage and about the paranoia of our capitalist society. It helped me understand the role of Ukraine today as NATO Proxy against Russia. It all started during that pillage, and the USA-UK paranoia against the Soviet union.
The book is set inside all manner of science – physics and psychiatry, for a start – and, as a reading experience, it is a bit like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Gravity’s Rainbow, what a beautiful title, is a hefty 750 pages’ read. It is also witty, if you can imagine such a thing, given that it was already exposing the horrors of “the Epstein class”. Pynchon is still alive, and lives very privately, away from the press and media, apparently in New York City.
For non-fiction, two works have helped me during this difficult time of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and now South Lebanon, and of the wars against Iran and before that Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, to name the main ones. The two are very different books.
The first is the essential classic, a short book by Carl von Clausewitz, published in 1832 after his death, and then translated later into other languages. His work helped me, because I immediately understand all the current military analyses, which inevitably revert to his ideas, so influential were they on Western thinking.
Clausewitz links war to politics, in particular, and also to the interface between the political sphere, the military sphere and the sphere of the will of the broad masses of the people. He studies even the inherent unpredictability of war. Many phrases we use today come from this tiny, easy to read book. Things like “war is an expression of politics”, and “the fog of war”, referring to the role of propaganda or what is now called “cognitive warfare”.
The other non-fiction that I found powerful was the Dispatches by Michael Herr. It is again a fairly short book, 270 pages or so. It is technically easy to read, but an emotionally heavy book. It was published in 1977 after the Vietnam War he witnessed.
All five books – the three novels and the two non-fiction – will help you through the night of these dark times we are living in. They put you off war. And they make you want to live, and to laugh, and to get total disarmament going, world-wide. Which is why I write these recommendations. That is what we need. Not to disarm just poor Iran so it cannot have an atom bomb, but to disarm every single nation-state, starting with Israel and with the biggest armed states of the world, including the only one that has intentionally dropped an atom bomb on civilians, and which dropped two, and following through to every other other atom bomb. And then, in general, de-militarizing the world.
That is the “peace” part of the socialist program during the Russian Revolution, in its slogan of “bread, land and peace.” Turning the guns into ploughs, the bases into climate and weather stations and renewable energy facilities that can employ all the soldiers transferred from the military bases and from the fronts.
Lindsey Collen
