Books about the aftermath of war: Novels and memoirs of coming home

The real psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers treats shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, including Siegfried Sassoon, who has publicly refused to return to the front. Rivers’s job is to make broken men well enough to return to what broke them, and Barker never lets him or the reader forget it. She wrote about trauma as it was understood before the word was in common use, with a precision I rarely find in contemporary trauma fiction. It’s the first book of a trilogy, and the third, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Brittain left Oxford to serve as a nurse in World War I and lost her fiancé, her brother, and close friends to it. Written more than a decade after the armistice, this memoir attempts to account for what the war took and what it left behind. It’s also a precise, unsentimental record of what the war did to the women who nursed and grieved, then were expected to return to ordinary life as if nothing had happened. I count it among the great antiwar books in English.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when Allied bombers destroyed the city in February 1945, and it took him more than twenty years to write about it. Billy Pilgrim, his stand-in, comes home, becomes a prosperous optometrist in upstate New York, and comes “unstuck in time,” moving between the war, his marriage, and an alien zoo. As an aftermath novel, it’s one of the clearest portraits I know of a man whose war keeps happening to him decades later, written before post-traumatic stress was a diagnosis.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna Pueblo and white ancestry, comes home to New Mexico after surviving captivity in the Philippines, where his cousin Rocky died. The veterans’ hospital can’t help him, and neither can the bars where the other returned soldiers drink. His recovery comes through a ceremony guided by Betonie, a Navajo medicine man, that ties his healing to the land and to his people’s stories. This book imagines what healing might actually take.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Marlantes, a decorated Marine officer, spent decades after Vietnam trying to understand what the war had left inside him. This book is the result: an honest account of killing and its aftermath. He writes about the rituals soldiers lack to make sense of what they’ve done, and the moral injury that builds when someone does things that can’t be undone. It’s the most direct book I know about living with a war from the inside, long after it’s officially over.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Cacciato, a private in Paul Berlin’s squad, walks away from the war and announces he’s headed for Paris. Berlin imagines the squad chasing him all the way there. O’Brien moves between that imagined journey and the war itself to show how a mind survives combat by building stories and escape routes when the real thing becomes too much. It won the National Book Award in 1979, and it’s stranger and less read than The Things They Carried. The question under it, what a mind does with what it can’t process, is what this whole list asks.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Finkel embedded with a U.S. Army infantry battalion in Iraq for his earlier book, The Good Soldiers, then followed the same soldiers home. What he found there is post-traumatic stress in specific houses and marriages, in men trying to get back into lives that no longer fit them. It’s hard to read, and it’s the book I’d hand to anyone who wants to know what the Iraq War did to the Americans who came home from it.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Powers served in Iraq and wrote this novel afterward. In Al Tafar in 2004, Private John Bartle promises the mother of Daniel Murphy, the young soldier he’s been told to look after, that he’ll bring her son home, and he can’t. The prose reads more like poetry than conventional narrative. I think that’s the right choice because the broken, lyrical structure mirrors what Bartle is doing back home in Virginia: trying to build something coherent out of an experience that had no coherence while he was inside it. It’s one of the few Iraq War novels that has stayed with me.

Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon