Looking for books for a gift for my friend. They like stories about the people affected by war but don’t like biographies. They also like stories about trauma. But they read a lot so I am looking for pretty obscure titles so I can get them something they haven’t read before.
Books they have read and loved:
Anne Frank;
The Way I Used To Be;
If You Tell;
I Am Malala;
First They Killed My Father
by Matcha_Earthbender
13 Comments
City of Thieves by David bennioff
{{All Quiet on the Western Front}} is far from obscure (undeniably one of the greatest war novels ever written) but isn’t on your list.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
{{Human Acts by Han Kang}} is about the the 1980 South Korean Gwangju democratization uprising and the effects of that movement for different people.
casualties by Lynne Reid Banks is from 1983. one of the four main characters is a Dutch woman who was raped as a child during the German occupation.
scribbling the cat by Alexandra fuller is a very challenging account of her “travels with an African soldier.’ it’s not a biography, more a road trip story. fwiw I’m roughly Fuller’s age and from roughly that place and time, and I think she nailed it.
Martha Gelhorn’s war correspondence in The Face of War, or her novel A Stricken Field.
**The Snow Society**, Pablo Vierci. It’s truly outstanding survival non-fiction. The best I have read.
It’s also, thanks to it’s structure and subject matter, a fascinating set of case studies on 16 distinctly different experiences of and responses to the same severely traumatic incident.
Every other chapter is condensed from interviews, 36 years later, with each of the 16 survivors of the crash of the Uruguayan Fairchild 571 (and subsequent 72 days left for dead on a glacier in the high Andes before they succeeded in self-rescuing) in 1972.
The author grew up with a number of people who were on the plane, and was close friends with a few of the survivors and a few of the dead. That shared background is a lot of why he was able to get all sixteen of them to participate.
I read it in Spanish, but it will be coming out in English translation some time this winter.
A long way gone
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
[**Razor’s Edge**](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31196) (1944)
*by W. Somerset Maugham*
[**Johnny Got His Gun**](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51606) (1939)
*by Dalton Trumbo*
**Triage, by Scott Anderson** tells two war stories in parallel. One is about Northern Iraq from the perspective of a photojournalist on assignment, and the other is about the Spanish Civil War.