Books like Life class by Pat Barker

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

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

A war novel that follows Union private Henry Fleming as he confronts fear and shame after fleeing battle, seeking a symbolic "red badge of courage" and ultimately taking on the role of standard-bearer.

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.

A tale of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality.

The final volume of Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, *The Ghost Road* follows the psychological toll of World War I on soldiers and their healers, and was awarded the 1995 Booker Prize.

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 true‑story examination of a Laotian immigrant child’s illness and the clash between Hmong cultural beliefs and Western medical practice.

In 1914 Vienna, medical student Lucius enlists in World War I, only to find himself in a frozen field hospital amid a typhus outbreak, where he must learn brutal makeshift medicine from a lone nurse and confront the war’s harsh realities.

Set in London in 1918, "The Eye in the Door" follows Billy Prior, an Intelligence officer at the Ministry of Munitions, as he wrestles with his personal relationships and identity while serving the war effort.

After World War I, Inspector John Madden investigates a brutal murder in a quiet village, using the emerging science of criminal psychology to unravel a serial killer’s plans.

"On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her"--From publisher's website.

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.

After WWI, Lily Valance seeks escape in 1920s music halls, only to fall for decorated officer Stephen Winters, whose war trauma and family secrets threaten the fragile peace of their love.

Set during World War I, Anne Perry’s Angels in the Gloom follows the Reavley family as they navigate front‑line service, espionage in London, and a looming threat from a war‑shaping ideologue.

Set in the final months of World War I, *We Shall Not Sleep* follows Captain‑Chaplain Joseph Reavley, his sister ambulance driver Judith, and their brother Matthew as they confront war‑torn violence, a ruthless ideology, and a dangerous plot that threatens the fragile peace.

A young woman investigates her brother’s death in World War I and discovers a long-buried secret in this compelling historical novel set in London during the war and post-war era.