• WW1 (1914-1918) 16-19 million Deaths

**Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (very moving and powerful account of life in the French trenches)

**The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West (three women deal with a man they loved, who has lost his memory due to shell shock. Short and lyrical)

**A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway (an autobiographical novel about the US army in Italy during the war)

Regeneration - Pat Barker (the beginning of a highly acclaimed trilogy set in the trenches)

Poems - Wilfred Owen (the most famous war poet of all, shot the week the war ended).

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford (A modernist story with an unreliable narrator, covering betrayal and love).

Journey’s End - R C Sherriff (a play about life in the trenches)

Strange Meeting - Susan HIll (based on poets Sassoon and Owen meeting, a poignant story that switches between the trenches and green and pleasant England).

A Month in the Country - J L Carr (a soldier recovering from shell shock using work in a rural community for rehabilitating himself. Gentle and short)

• Russian Civil War (1917-22) 7 million

Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (a love story spanning the revolution up to WW2 and communism. Also a beautiful film)

**War and Peace - Tolstoy (one of the best novels of all time. Listen to the audiobook if you don’t want to read it)

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (a talking cat and -is it?- the devil are among a riotous bunch of characters in Moscow)

Travesties - Tom Stoppard (a play imagining Lenin meeting some of the key writers and artists of the era in Zurich. Clever and witty).

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (A sci-fi space age allegory of communism)

• Chinese Civil War (1927 - 1949) 9-11 million

Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard(on the fall of Shanghai a privileged English child finds himself in a Japanese POW camp)

**Eileen Chang - Lust, Caution (espionage, honey traps, women and assassination plots)

The Kitchen God’s Wife - Amy Tan (a Chinese-American mother with a brain tumour recounts the family history in China)

**The Bonesetter’s Daughter - Amy Tan (A woman gets in touch with her past including family members massacred in China)

The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan (16 vignettes about Chinese-American women and identity)

Dragon Seed - Pearl Buck (a family torn between the Japanese invaders and the resistance)

• WW2 (1939-1945) 50-80 million (if you include famine)

(22 million of these were Chinese)

**Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres (a touching pair of love stories set on a Greek island, involving the Italian and German armies and the local residents. Sweet, funny, tragic).

**Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (a man with PTSD tells aliens about the firebombing of Dresden)

**The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (narrated by Death, a quirky, touching, easy read about children in Germany in WW2)

The Reader - Bernhard Schlink (a schoolboy has an affair with a woman who later works in a concentration camp, and is called upon to rethink his actions upon her trial)

Charlotte Gray - Sebastian Faulks (a Scottish woman in the French resistance is trying to find her RAF love, in Nazi occupied land)

**Maus - Art Spiegelman (a graphic novel imagining the Nazis as cats terrorising mice)

Atonement - Ian McEwan (a childhood misunderstanding leads to lifelong tragedy for characters separated by WW1. Epic descriptions of Dunkirk)

Sophie’s Choice - William Styron (a mother can only save one of her children in a concentration camp - which should she choose?)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society - Mary Ann Shaffer (a London writer exchanges letters with Nazi-occupied Guernsey residents and realises she has to visit)

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr (a blind French girl meets a German boy in Nazi occupied France)

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (beautiful novel spanning the Middle East and Europe in WW2 with a tragic affair at the heart)

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (An American bombardier tries to escape fighting by feigning madness, darkly satirical and comic)

A Town like Alice - Nevil Shute (an ex POW attempts to rebuild life in Australia)

Ragnarok - A S Byatt (a fictionalised memoir where the writer links her terror of the war to Norse myths of the end of the world)

• Korean War (1950-1953) 1 million

The Manchurian Candidate - Richard Condon (political thriller - a son of a prominent family is brainwashed into making an assassination attempt)

• Vietnam War (1955-1975) 2-4 million

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien (short stories about soldiers whom we come to know through what they carried into battle)

The Lotus Eaters - Tatjana Soli (American photojournalist finds herself in a love triangle, and war)

The Sorrow of War - Bao Ninh (written by one of only 10 survivors from 500 young people sent to fight, recounts the suffering)

The Quiet American - Graham Greene (a spy thriller where the Brits, Americans and their Vietnamese lovers are not all as they seem)

The Sympathiser - Viet Thanh Nguyen - (a war criminal escapes to the US and a communist sympathiser with torn loyalties is caught in the crossfire)

• Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) 1-3 million

**Half a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (twin sisters take wildly different paths in life but both are swept up by the Biafran war)

Sozaboy - Ken Saro Wiwa (a boy joins the fight to impress his family/peers, unaware of what lies ahead. The author was executed for rebellion)

The Man Died - Wole Soyinka (prison diary from Nobel prize winning playwright who was imprisoned without charge during the war)

• Bangladesh War of Independence (1971) 3 million +

The Black Coat - Neamat Imam (dystopian novel about power, greed and the human cost of politics)

Of Blood and Fire - Jahanara Imam (diary of the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh)

• Afghanistan (1975-present) 1-2 million

**The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Afghani boys’ friendship and betrayal which haunts the narrator for the rest of his life)

**A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (an illegitimate girls struggles within an arranged marriage)

The Bookseller of Kabul - Asne Seierstad (The writer moves from Scandinavia to Kabul and writes of the daily lives and struggles of a family there)

**Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie (an epic novel scanning Nagasaki, the Afghan war and Guantanamo - captivating)

I am Malala - Malala Yousafzai (memoir of the girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for standing up for girls rights to an education. Easy reading)

I am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes (9/11, the Soviet-Afghan war and how people become radicalised)

• 2nd Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) 1-2 million

Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih (a Sudanese man returns to his village after studying poetry in London, newly aware of the brutal history of colonisation)

The Translator - Leila Aboulela (a boy born in Darfur is sent to an English boarding school but gets caught up in tragedy on his return)

Emma’s War - Emma Scroggins (a westerner marries a warlord - this is her true account)

Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux (travel writing that made the writer internationally famous, with this trans-African account)

**The Shadow of the Sun - Ryszard Kapuscinski (reportage from a celebrated Polish journalist working across the continent - easy reading)

• 2nd Congo War (1998-2003) 3-5 million

**The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver (US Baptist minister drags his wife and 4 daughters to be missionaries, told from all perspectives, thrown into chaos by the 1st Congo War. Brilliant, gripping novel)

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed WIth Our Families - Philip Gourevitch (Rwandan genocide recounted)

Johnny Mad Dog - Emmanuel Dongala (Congolese teen leads a band of fighters on a rampage)

** = particularly fantastic books!