Friday, August 16, 2013

Five top war novels

Simon Mawer is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel The Glass Room, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His previous novels include The Fall (winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize), The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel’s Dwarf (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize). English by birth, he has made Italy his home for more than thirty years.

His latest novel is the widely acclaimed Trapeze [UK title: The Girl Who Fell From The Sky].

Mawer named five of his favorite war novels for the Telegraph.  One title on the list:
Every one of these writers [on the list] experienced war at first hand and, amid the misery of death and destruction, each managed to find humour of a kind.

The tradition continues among living writers: The Things They Carried (1990) is a remarkable collection of intertwined narratives in which Tim O’Brien explores the boundaries between truth and fiction while telling stories drawn directly from his own experience in Vietnam. So it goes.
Read about the other novels on the list.

The Things They Carried is among Olen Steinhauer's six favorite books and one of Roger “R.J.” Ellory's five favorite human dramas. Melinda L. Pash, author of In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War, says The Things They Carried changed her life.

Visit Simon Mawer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Trapeze.

My Book, The Movie: Trapeze.

--Marshal Zeringue