Books like Feu by Henri Barbusse

A German World War I trainee, Paul Bäumer, documents his disillusionment as the war destroys his classmates’ idealism and forces him to confront the futility of combat.

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

A collection of linked short stories that follows a platoon of American soldiers and their experiences, thoughts, and burdens during the Vietnam War.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel follows Princeton student Amory Blaine as he navigates romance, ambition, and post‑world‑war disillusionment, offering a sharp portrait of the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation.

Richard Hannay and three fellow adventurers travel through war‑torn Europe, disguising themselves to thwart a German plot while confronting dangers in Germany, Constantinople, and the Russian border.

John Keegan’s authoritative history of the Great War traces the political failures, battlefield campaigns, and human cost that reshaped Europe and the world.

Regeneration follows two real soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital during World War I, exploring their shell‑shock, rehabilitation, and the intellectual debates that shaped postwar Britain.

A sweeping Russian novel that chronicles the lives of Don Cossacks during the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War.

Rebecca West’s wartime novel follows an English soldier with shell‑shock and three women, weaving a tight domestic setting with the upheaval of World War I and early twentieth‑century class shifts.

"Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. Barthas' riveting wartime narrative, first published in France in 1978, presents the vivid, immediate experiences of a frontline soldier. This excellent new translation brings Barthas' wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a "poilu," or "hairy one," as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas' return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War"-- Contains primary source documents.

In Douglas Reeman’s World War I novel, the third entry in the Blackwood saga, Jonathan Blackwood and his Royal Marine family confront the brutal realities of Gallipoli and Flanders, as the age of honor gives way to modern warfare.

Humphrey Cobb’s *Paths of Glory* follows French soldiers in the First World War whose doomed assault on a German position leads to a brutal inquiry, exposing the cruelty of wartime orders and the injustice of scapegoating ordinary men.

A graphic novel that brings World War I to life by showing the battlefield struggles of soldiers alongside the everyday anxieties of their families at home.

Two young friends enlist in the British Army at the outbreak of World War I and must confront the horrors of the Flanders mud together, testing their bond against the brutal reality of war.

Three farmers depicted by August Sander in 1914 become the nexus of a 20‑century story, linking a young narrator in the present, a Boston computer writer, and the looming horrors of World War I.