Here are 100 books that Sophie's Choice fans have personally recommended if you like
Sophie's Choice.
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From an early age, I have made a life out of listening to, telling, teaching, and writing about war stories. I am intrigued by their widespread personal and public importance. My changing associations with these stories and their tellers have paralleled evolving stages in my life—son, soldier, father, and college professor. Each stage has spawned different questions and insights about the tales and their narrators. At various moments in my own life, these war stories have also given rise to fantasized adventure, catharsis, emotional highs and lows, insights about human nature tested within the crucible of war, and intriguing relationships with the storytellers—their lives and minds.
As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he succeeds in doing, but I find the soldiers’ personal war stories more gripping and truthful. For me and even Herr, the real surprise is that this book ultimately chronicles the author’s own war story of innocence lost: the anti-war reporter becomes just as addicted to war as some of his…
A groundbreaking piece of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but…
Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.
Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.
From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…
Having edited 5 newspapers in North London a few years ago, I found that my love of reading–especially historical novels–expanded to writing once my business was sold to a well-known newspaper publishing company. All history fascinates me, as is obvious from my recommendations, and even though these could be listed as fiction, they all have a great deal of fact within them. I delved into historical reading as a very young girl and progressed from the Georgette Heyer novels to my current more in-depth novelists, so my range has been quite vast and varied over the years. I truly wish I had more time to read.
My interest in history once again comes to the fore in this book by Edward Rutherfurd. It is an epic saga that takes readers into the lives of five families in Salisbury, beginning in the Ice Age to 1985.
It follows two rival families who sought revenge on each other for over 400 years, whilst a stonemason’s family’s constructions spanned from the creation of Stonehenge to Salisbury Cathedral. It touches on the family of an exiled Roman soldier and an aristocrat who fell from grace, taking many generations for the family fortune to be revived.
This is a fascinating read, showing how the families, the land, and the buildings around them evolved and the skills that brought Salisbury to its intriguing place today. I found it a little heavy going at times, but it was well worth my perseverance.
'A high-speed cavalcade of our island story' DAILY EXPRESS 'Supremely well crafted and a delight to read' CHICAGO TRIBUNE 'A thundering good read' THE BOOKSELLER 'A richly imagined vision of history' SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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FIVE INTERCONNECTED FAMILIES
Sarum weaves an enthralling saga of five families - the Wilsons, the Masons, the family of Porteus, the Shockleys, and the Godfreys - who reflect the changing character of Britain.
CENTURIES OF TURMOIL AND TYRANNY
In a novel of extraordinary richness, the whole sweep of British civilization unfolds through the story of one place, Sailsbury, from beyond recorded time…
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
I can’t understand why this book isn’t better known. It is an actual diary that survived by chance. It was written by a young woman of twenty-one from a wealthy Jewish family long-established in France and not thinking of themselves as anything but French. I found it gripping and harrowing, all the more so because when the Nazis conquer France and start to impose restrictions on Jews, Hélène cannot grasp what is happening or what lies ahead. She has had a happy, secure life, but now these hideous indignities are being imposed on her.
When she is forced to wear the yellow star, she is horrified by the jeers and insults directed at her in the streets by passers-by whom she has always thought of as fellow citizens. The diary brings home, like almost nothing else I’ve read, the way in which the ordinary life of the intended victims turned…
Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.
On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about…
This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?
That’s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, a…
I am a teacher of Native American skills in the mountains of north Georgia. Each day when I leave my house to enter the forest, I am keenly aware that I am stepping on land that once “belonged” to the Cherokee. Everything around me in the forest was intimately known and used by the original people, and these same items have become the critical tools in my own life. I know the Cherokee history, and I know the white man’s history. I believe the clash of these two cultures deserves to be told in full.
I consider this one of the best novels that demonstrates the clash of two cultures that fairly defines the history of our American West. Both sides are examined to reveal the opposing motives of whites and Indians.
The good and the bad emerge on each side of the equation. Almost everything in the book is based on actual events in order to give the reader a sense of history while he/she is entertained by a good story.
Written to commemorate the Bicentennial in 1976, James A. Michener’s magnificent saga of the Westis an enthralling celebration of the frontier. Brimming with the glory of America’s past, the story of Colorado—the Centennial State—is manifested through its people: Lame Beaver, the Arapaho chieftain and warrior, and his Comanche and Pawnee enemies; Levi Zendt, fleeing with his child bride from the Amish country; the cowboy, Jim Lloyd, who falls in love with a wealthy and cultured Englishwoman, Charlotte Seccombe. In Centennial, trappers, traders, homesteaders, gold seekers, ranchers, and hunters are brought together in the dramatic conflicts that shape the…
Living through the Iraq War compelled me to honestly challenge who I was, what I had believed in, and reshape who I am. One aspect to emerge from that is the belief that there is no good war. War is the worst of all endeavors, born from fundamentally weak minds that are blind to imagination and vision. But while I have had a passion for writing about war and speaking out against it, I feel it’s important for people to look beyond my work as just another veteran writing just another war book. In both of my books, the war is a character more than anything else.
While admittedly not a “war” book, Jack London’s masterful novel illustrates notions associated with war and society in an artful way. And he does it within two characters… a truth seeker and a believer in the establishment. From the rich and powerful to the impoverished with no voice, he clearly understood what is behind the masks we don in society. Fantastic read.
The semiautobiographical Martin Eden is the most vital and original character Jack London ever created. Set in San Francisco, this is the story of Martin Eden, an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame. London, dissatisfied with the rewards of his own success, intended Martin Eden as an attack on individualism and a criticism of ambition; however, much of its status as a classic has been conferred by admirers of its ambitious protagonist. Andrew Sinclair's wide-ranging introduction discusses the conflict between London's support of socialism and his powerful self-will. Sinclair also explores the parallels…
Living through the Iraq War compelled me to honestly challenge who I was, what I had believed in, and reshape who I am. One aspect to emerge from that is the belief that there is no good war. War is the worst of all endeavors, born from fundamentally weak minds that are blind to imagination and vision. But while I have had a passion for writing about war and speaking out against it, I feel it’s important for people to look beyond my work as just another veteran writing just another war book. In both of my books, the war is a character more than anything else.
Never in my life have I read a book that so closely echoed my heart and mind as an Iraq War veteran, unsettled wayfarer, and conscientious objector. It was a true reflection of my soul as I was searching for meaning within my own life and a fractured America.
"Baron Wormser has done something important with TOM O' VIETNAM in the way that he has identified and precisely embraced a stunningly particular historical moment we casually refer to as 'Viet Nam,' as if the name was not a country but a dark shroud of moral collapse that hangs over us still. More remarkably, he has constructed this narrative from the point of view of a combat soldier, fighting in the American War in Viet Nam. Somehow there is a deep legitimacy to this soldier's story because Wormser has been excruciatingly precise in his consideration and use of details—what Hemingway…
Living through the Iraq War compelled me to honestly challenge who I was, what I had believed in, and reshape who I am. One aspect to emerge from that is the belief that there is no good war. War is the worst of all endeavors, born from fundamentally weak minds that are blind to imagination and vision. But while I have had a passion for writing about war and speaking out against it, I feel it’s important for people to look beyond my work as just another veteran writing just another war book. In both of my books, the war is a character more than anything else.
This is a story of new beginnings and it shook my preconceived notions of what a memoir embodies. By going back to Vietnam years after the war, the author illustrates how love and time can change our opinions… that hate is the easy way out… that differences can allow us to understand how truly precious we all are… that we can come full circle, out of the darkness and into the light.
With all the breathtaking imagery and lyric fury that characterizes his acclaimed poetry, Bruce Weigl recounts his struggles in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which tore his life apart and in return gave him his poetic voice. Upon his release from duty he turned to alcohol, drugs, and women, living for years in a confused purgatory until he discovered salvation in poetry and in the love of his wife and their son. Yet it was only through a harrowing journey back to Vietnam, to adopt his eight-year-old daughter, that Weigl was finally able to heal himself. Moving from childhood…
During my 45 years of practicing law, I've learned that everyone has flaws, but we all still struggle to be recognized and accepted. I always ask my law clients why things have gone sideways because understanding the personalities involved and why they are in conflict is essential. This depth of understanding is equally necessary in the process of writing believable fiction. Characters and their conflicts must resonate with the reader. For me, as a writer, this is the essential challenge for writing good fiction. I can have imaginary conversations with any of my characters because they become very real personalities in my mind.
Just because you are a good person, does not mean that those who occupy your social class are not equally good people. It often takes personal sacrifice, and a willingness to face personal risk, in order to help those who are deserving.
Even if it means you may be found out and punished for your good deeds.
The basis for the Oscar-winning Spielberg movie, this novel recreates the story of Oskar Schindler, an Aryan who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This is a vivid and gripping true account of how a brilliant Polish Jewish pianist survived by a fluke the Nazi mass-murder of Warsaw’s Jews in which his parents and three siblings died. The author hid in the ruins of Warsaw through two winters without heating and eating only scraps of food he managed to scavenge. Near death, he was, almost unbelievably, found and helped by a German SS officer who had heard him playing a battered piano.
The book shows humanity at both its worst and its best. The film by Roman Polanski is brilliant, but this memoir is even more powerful.
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film.
'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday
'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer
After writing the Dilemma, I was struck by how many readers’ feedback posed this question, What would I have done?In the process of writing the book, whilst I created the story around this one particular big fat problem, I little realised how it would resonate with so many, and also have such divided – and deeply personal responses. I’ve since become increasingly fascinated by the many ‘sliding door’ moments we experience in our lives requiring split-second decisions which may (in retrospect) have been ill-considered but by then it’s too late to ‘wind back time.’ All we can do is learn to live with consequences, however damaging they may be.
Another novel set in WW2, this dark story delves into how far a man will go to secure his survival – and the guilt (and unhappiness) he must subsequently live with as a result of his arrogance in believing his money and status gives him certain privileges. Wealthy lawyer Chavel is a prisoner in occupied France. His Nazi gaolers decree three men are to be executed, at the prisoners’ discretion. The men draw lots and when Chavel’s name is drawn he offers his fortune to anyone who will take his place. A dying man agrees. What unravels after war’s end, and Chavel is released, offers him a chance for redemption for his cowardice.
From the author of the classics Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, a morally complex tale about a man at the mercy of deadly forces while being held in a German prison camp during World War II. Featuring an introduction by the author and two other story ideas from his archives.
When Jean-Louis Chauvel, a French lawyer incarcerated in a German prison camp, is informed by his captors that three prisoners must die, he devises a plan for survival. Offering everything he owns to a fellow prisoner if he will take Chauvel’s place, he manages to escape the…
