Friday, August 16, 2013

Five of the best 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:
[One novel] from the American experience is Slaughterhouse Five (1969), in which Kurt Vonnegut employed the surreal techniques of science fiction to deal, in part, with his own experience of being in Dresden during the raid and firestorm of February 1945.
Read about another book on the list.

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five also made Melissa Albert's list of six favorite fictional book nerds, Jon Ronson's five top list of books on madness, John Mullan's list of ten of the best aliens in science fiction, Charlie Jane Anders and Michael Ann Dobbs's list of twelve great stories to help you to cope with mortality, Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 list of books about psychological journeys, and Tiffany Murray's top ten list of black comedies.

Visit Simon Mawer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Trapeze.

My Book, The Movie: Trapeze.

--Marshal Zeringue