The Best World War I Books

A richly illustrated commemoration of African Americans’ roles in World War I highlighting how the wartime experience shaped their lives and their communities after they returned home. As in many previous wars, black soldiers served the United States during the war, fighting to secure rights they did not yet have at home in the States. We Return Fighting reveals the way the conflict shaped African American identity and lent fuel to their longstanding efforts to demand full civil rights and to stake their place in the country’s cultural and political landscape.

From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That Ended Peace is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars happen in spite of the near-universal desire to keep the peace. Destined to become a classic, The War That Ended Peace enriches our understanding of one of the defining periods and events of the twentieth century.

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain’s elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war’s end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. It speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.

The novel that has done more than any other to inspire opposition to war, in a major new translation that captures its undiminished literary power for a new generation. Galvanized by youthful idealism and patriotic fervor, nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer and his schoolmates enlist in the Germany army at the onset of World War I. But soon their dreams of heroism shatter beneath the first shells of the bombardment, as they find on the battle front not the glory they were promised but savage brutality. At a time when we are more divided than ever, this classic novel reminds us that enemy soldiers who’ve been demonized by the rhetoric of war actually have much in common, giving it the potential to generate principled outrage about the senselessness of war for another hundred years.

Writing her first novel during World War I, West examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering from shell-shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England’s class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Drawing on exhaustive research, this intimate account details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world.

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe — a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and the Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

From the acclaimed military historian, a history of the outbreak of World War I: The dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles — the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg — that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches.

An in-depth, authoritative account of the fall of 1914 on the Western Front and the First Battle of Ypres, a true turning point in World War I and in modern warfare — by the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In this visceral account, based on thirty years of research, Cowley details the crucial decisions that determined the outcome of the Great War — which may have been decided by a single, extraordinary afternoon.

In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he encounters a horror of violence and gore he could not have imagined and sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side.  Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows he must rejoin his regiment and fight until the end.

Goodbye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern world would never be the same. In Graves’s portrayal of the dehumanizing misery of the trenches, his grief over lost friends, and the surreal absurdity of government bureaucracy, Graves uses broad comedy to make the most serious points about life and death.

In early 1915, the death of a young friend on the battlefields of Ypres inspired Canadian soldier, field surgeon and poet John McCrae to write “In Flanders Fields.” Within months of the poem’s December 1915 publication in the British magazine Punch it became part of the collective consciousness in North America and Europe, and its extraordinary power has endured over the decades and across generations. In this anthology, Canada’s finest historians, novelists and poets contemplate the evolving meaning of the poem; the man who wrote it and the World War I setting from which it emerged; its themes of valour, grief and remembrance; and the iconic image of the poppy.

In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: Thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

The definitive account of the Great War and national bestseller from one of our most eminent military historians, John Keegan. The First World War probes the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict and takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe’s crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. Keegan reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love.