Thursday, January 29, 2015

The top ten books about returning from war

Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. In 2014 his short story collection Redeployment was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize and won the National Book Award for Fiction.

One of his top ten books about returning from war, as shared at the Guardian:
Regeneration by Pat Barker

At the beginning of this novel Dr William Rivers, the psychiatrist to the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon, holds up Sassoon’s antiwar manifesto and declares, “It just occurs to me that a diagnosis of neurasthenia might not be inconvenient confronted with this.” Sassoon’s mental anguish is both real and, to those who’d like to dismiss what he has to say, useful.
Read about another entry on the list.

Regeneration is among Sarah Moss's top ten hospital novels and Hermione Norris's six best books. The Regeneration Trilogy is on William Skidelsky's list of the 10 best historical novels.

--Marshal Zeringue