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War as a theme in fiction

Conflict, and its resolution, is at the heart of many narratives. These books take conflict itself as their subject, around the world and throughout time, both civil and very uncivil, exploring the cost of war on those who wage it.

· Three young men from one family join the Māori Battalion to serve in Italy and just one returns in Patricia Grace’s Tu.

· When a deeply traumatised soldier comes home from the Iraq War, the savagery of the battlefield returns with him in Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Carthage, in a disturbing vision of American guilt.

· In the context of wartime Britain, Kate Atkinson explores the ideas of fate and second chances in a book which offers multiple possible endings in Life After Life.

· Returning to Scotland after a disastrous mission in Afghanistan, Luke is trying to forget, while his elderly grandmother struggles to remember, in The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan.

· The intersection between war and commerce is explored in Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears, telling the story of the life and mysterious death of arms manufacturer John Stone.

· Kelly Ana Morey sets her novel Quinine in the Pacific, as German-ruled Neuguinea is taken possession of by Australia after WWI.

· A Captain in Britain’s disastrous campaign against Napoleon’s forces in Spain recovers from his injuries only to evade a return to the battlefield in Now We Shall be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller, but the conflict pursues him still.

· The chaos and damage of WWII is the fitting backdrop for the confusion and misinterpretation which blights lives in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

· John A Lee’s Civilian into Soldier is a fictionalised but autobiographical account of one New Zealander’s experience fighting in the Great War.

· Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, weaves together prose and poetry, timelines and mythologies, as it follows a half-Pueblo, half-white man upon his return from WWII: his war trauma is a metaphor for the damage wreaked by colonisation, and it is healed by traditional ceremonies of transformation.