Here are 91 books that The Nameless Soldier fans have personally recommended if you like
The Nameless Soldier.
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“Hope in dark places” has been the theme of my life, beginning at age 17 when my parents disowned me for my faith. I’ve walked through the “valley of the shadow of death” twice, battling cancer, and endured many other struggles, which everyone faces at some time in their lives. Reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey as a teen gave me the courage to face the darkness, and so the characters in the stories I write and prefer to read do likewise.
Only rarely have I read a book that affected me as profoundly as this one. Having survived cancer twice, this story of a young girl living with a terminal disease left me in a puddle of emotions, yet it has so much life and hope. Niya is such a strong heroine, she inspires me to never, ever give up! And Alk the fire salamander is one of the most memorable fantasy characters ever.
A deadly disease. A vanishing remedy. A breathless journey. All her life, Niya's known she will die young from the fatal rasp. She survives only with the aid of vitrisar spice and a magical, curmudgeonly fire salamander named Alk. Then an ambitious princess burns down the vitrisar grove in an effort to steal Alk so she can claim her rightful throne. Joined by Jayesh, a disgraced monk, Niya and Alk must flee to the faraway Hidden Temple with the last vitrisar plant, or all who suffer from the rasp will perish. But even as Niya’s frustration and banter with Jayesh…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
“Hope in dark places” has been the theme of my life, beginning at age 17 when my parents disowned me for my faith. I’ve walked through the “valley of the shadow of death” twice, battling cancer, and endured many other struggles, which everyone faces at some time in their lives. Reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey as a teen gave me the courage to face the darkness, and so the characters in the stories I write and prefer to read do likewise.
I felt instant empathy for the two main characters in this book. The half-human Jace is hated and feared only because he is half ryrik, so I felt great sympathy for him, having been hated by those I loved. It hurts so badly, which made me hurt for Jace. Another character who later befriends Jace lives in a dangerous situation and faces terrible persecution in an especially memorable scene. It made me wonder if I could be as steadfast in her place. Both encourage me to be courageous in difficult situations.
“Don’t you know? Animals like you have no soul."Could God ever love a half-blood all of society looks upon with such fear and disdain? Jace once believed so, but when a tragic loss shatters the only peace he’s ever known, his faith crumbles as the nagging doubts he’s tried to put behind him descend on his grieving heart. With them come the haunting memories of the bloodstained past he longs to forget, but can never escape.Taken from home at a young age and raised to serve the emperor, Kyrin Altair lives every day under a dangerous pretense of loyalty. After…
“Hope in dark places” has been the theme of my life, beginning at age 17 when my parents disowned me for my faith. I’ve walked through the “valley of the shadow of death” twice, battling cancer, and endured many other struggles, which everyone faces at some time in their lives. Reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey as a teen gave me the courage to face the darkness, and so the characters in the stories I write and prefer to read do likewise.
When I first started reading this fantasy book club selection, I thought it would be a simple sort-of-like Cinderella tale and didn’t expect to be sucked into Leah’s story. My heart went out to her for all the ways she was unfairly treated and misunderstood, for I have known that pain. She was trying to save the royal family, and the queen exiled her!
The best part about this story is how brave and loyal Leah is, and how she doesn’t complain, even when she has good reason. I remember how difficult it was not to complain when I was a teen, so I especially appreciate the encouragement Leah gives without realizing it.
Only one person knows of the plot against the royal family and cares enough to try to stop it—the servant girl they banished.
Leah spends her days scrubbing floors, polishing silver, and meekly curtsying to nobility. Nothing distinguishes her from the other commoners serving at the palace, except her red hair.
And her secret friendship with Rafe, the Crown Prince of Imperia.
But Leah’s safe, ordinary world begins to splinter. Rafe’s parents announce his betrothal to a foreign princess, and she unearths a plot to overthrow the royal family. When she reports it without proof, her life shatters completely when…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
“Hope in dark places” has been the theme of my life, beginning at age 17 when my parents disowned me for my faith. I’ve walked through the “valley of the shadow of death” twice, battling cancer, and endured many other struggles, which everyone faces at some time in their lives. Reading Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey as a teen gave me the courage to face the darkness, and so the characters in the stories I write and prefer to read do likewise.
I confess, I was a bit nervous when I began this book because the main character was not very sympathetic. But Hette’s situation is so heart-wrenching (literally, because a sorcerer has stolen her heart) I kept reading to see what happened. Her journey to recover her heart is much more than a physical adventure, though I could taste the grit and mud, shivered with cold, and sweated from the unbearable heat she struggled through. It was a joy watching this young queen learn important life lessons in totally unexpected places. I felt as if I was learning and growing along with Hette, making the reading of this book a completely satisfying experience.
Come to Germania, where a clockwork heart rules and a fool advises–and a laugh can bring both to their knees.
When Princess Hette refuses a sorcerer's proposal, he retaliates by stealing her heart—literally.
Desperate to resist his influence, Hette makes herself emotionless, stifling all feelings until she can find her heart and win it back. Only Konrad, the despised Court Fool, knows where to find the sorcerer, and he has his own curse to battle.
Riddles and magic plague their path, including a memory stealing witch, an unbeatable knight, and a magic book that would as soon drown them as…
One of the reasons I started writing is because I wanted to create stories where I got to learn. I’m a scientist by trade—a molecular biologist and genetic engineer. All those years of concentrated schooling into a very narrow niche left little time to explore other corners of education—history, archeology, anthropology, art… Creating and writing stories allows me to build thrilling fiction using my scientific background and weaving in whatever feeds my soul and unlocks my imagination. I have never had so much fun and felt so fulfilled, and I highly recommend it.
A great book’s superpower is a story that sticks with the reader for a long time, as the Nameless collection did with me.
Dean Koontz is a master of creating deep anguish in his characters that propel their actions. Mix this emotion with science involving the brain and selective memory and you get the main character, Nameless, who doesn’t know who he is or remember his history.
Why? He willingly participates in targeted assassinations to eradicate evil from this world. Why? The quest for answers keeps the pages turning, allowing tantalizing glimpses of Nameless’s past life. When the answers are finally bared by a devastating revelation in the final story, we understand why Nameless chose his fate—because sometimes wish we could do the same.
A bloodthirsty sheriff is terrorizing a small Texas town where justice has been buried with his victims. Until Nameless arrives—a vigilante whose past is a mystery and whose future is written in blood.
Anyone who crosses Sheriff Russell Soakes is dead, missing, or warned. One of them is a single mother trying to protect her children but bracing herself for the worst. Nameless fears the outcome. He’s seen it in his visions. Now it’s time to teach the depraved Soakes a lesson in fear. But in turning predators into prey, will Nameless unearth a few secrets of his own?
I’m a Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient who fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As I explored the ramifications of combat and struggled to reintegrate when I returned home, I often felt veterans’ memoirs teetered on the brink of “war porn” as opposed to the crushing devastation and fear men and women face on the battlefield. Seeking to rectify the misconceptions about the longest-running wars in U.S. history, I began writing about my experiences on medium.com and amassed over 40,000 followers (which turned into a book deal). This list of books below directly influenced my work and—I believe—are the gold standards for true war stories.
I read this book shortly after returning home from Iraq and remained haunted for months. Despite the novel being a work of fiction, it details the modern veteran's struggle to find his place in society and his unadulterated embrace of violence and camaraderie that permeates each corner of his life. Powers’ explanation of combat is similar to the suspended moment before a car crash is told in prose that sings, and probably why he won the PEN/Hemingway Award for this work of art.
An unforgettable depiction of the psychological impact of war, by a young Iraq veteran and poet, THE YELLOW BIRDS is already being hailed as a modern classic. It is also a story of love, of great courage, and of extraordinary human survival.
WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and BOOK OF THE YEAR
A TLS, GUARDIAN, EVENING STANDARD and SUNDAY HERALD BOOK OF THE YEAR
Everywhere John looks, he sees Murph.
He flinches when cars drive past. His fingers clasp around the rifle he hasn't held for months. Wide-eyed strangers praise…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
When reading about famous battles such as Thermopylae, Tarawa, the Chosin Reservoir, or Taffy-3’s gallantry off Samar: have you ever wondered “what makes young men fight against such overwhelming odds?” Or a more important question: “would I do the same?” I know I wondered. Both my mom and dad were WW2 Marines, and I was raised with the stories of the Marines at Tarawa wading a half-mile ashore against horrific Japanese fire, along with their epic Korean War 79-mile fighting retreat in -50’F bitter cold and snow while grossly outnumbered by the Chinese army; these were often our dinnertime discussions and impromptu leadership lessons.
Those of us who read newspaper remember James Brady, who wrote Page Six a Hollywood gossip column that ran every Sunday for 25 years on the last page of Parade magazine.
What few knew is that James Brady was a Marine officer who’d seen combat in the Korean War, and lived to write 13 fiction and five nonfiction books, with his autobiography, “The Coldest Winter” nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Brady often described himself as “an immature 23-year old when I left for Korea, but when I left nine months later I was a grown-up and a pretty good Marine officer,” and reading his story, you’ll see this ‘pretty good Marine officer’ became a ‘pretty fine author.’
Brady concentrates on the Marines in his unit and his growth as an officer in leading them. Except for ‘Saving Private Ryan and few others, combat isn’t near as glorious or macho as…
James Brady's The Coldest War is a powerful and moving memoir of the Korean War.
America's "forgotten war" lasted just thirty-seven months, yet 54,246 Americans died in that time -- nearly as many as died in ten years in Vietnam. On the fiftieth anniversary of this devastating conflict, James Brady tells the story of his life as a young marine lieutenant in Korea.
In 1947, seeking to avoid the draft, nineteen-year-old Jim Brady volunteered for a Marine Corps program that made him a lieutenant in the reserves on the day he graduated college. He didn't plan to find himself in…
My father’s ancestors had deep ties to the South, owning slaves in North Carolina and fighting for the Confederacy. Raised in a household that was also home to a paternal grandmother born in Nashville in 1885, I grew up fascinated by the troubled, complicated world of the Old South. Over the years I have written nine books, all of which chronicle the intersections of race and politics in the nineteenth century. Since 1987 I have had the pleasure of teaching about the Civil War era to students in my home institution of Le Moyne College, but also at Colgate University, Cornell University, and the University College Dublin. Those classes never witnessed a dull moment.
James McPherson, the dean of Civil War scholars, is known to most readers as the author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, far and away the best single-volume history of the conflict. But this volume, which came out roughly a decade later in 1997, was one of the first military histories to move beyond generals and commanders and examine why common soldiers enlisted and remained loyal to their fellows even as the bloody conflict dragged on.
After reading tens of thousands of letters and diaries of more than one thousand U.S. and C.S.A. soldiers, McPherson opens previously shuttered windows into their hearts and minds. Their letters home reveal both the tedium and terror of numerous campaigns, and most of all, show how common soldiers were forced to wrestle with the issue of slavery, with northern soldiers, rather like their commander-in-chief, increasingly committed to ending the South’s…
General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, `You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that.' Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom - that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses - not hold true in the Civil…
As I write this, I massage aching bits of shrapnel still embedded beneath silvered scars. I’ve read many Vietnam War stories—praising the war, glorifying combat, condemning the war. My stories are 1st person limited POV, voice of a twenty-year-old sailor. My title is a spin-off of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. By the time I wrote my memoir, I realized that our national goals in Vietnam had been Muddy from the beginning. I too, traveled Jungle Rivers. During my time on the riverboat, I witnessed Rivers of blood—rivers of life, trickle across our deck. And yes, Jungle is a fitting metaphor for our life at that time.
This is the first Vietnam War book I read. For almost ten years I remained silent about my military service—many coworkers did not know I had served, let alone two tours and wounded in action. Caputo’s voice and sense of loss and waste and rage touched so close to my feelings. His gift of words made me live again the countless hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror—for me, ambushes, mines, incoming artillery, and mortar rounds. Twenty years in the future, when I began writing my stories, I read Caputo’s book again because I hoped to emulate his sense of angst.
The 40th anniversary edition of the classic Vietnam memoir―featured in the PBS documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick―with a new foreword by Kevin Powers
In March of 1965, Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed at Danang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history’s ugliest wars, he returned home―physically whole but emotionally wasted, his youthful idealism forever gone.
A Rumor of War is far more than one soldier’s story. Upon its publication in 1977, it shattered America’s indifference to the fate of…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I have always loved historical fiction as a reader, but my passion to write it caught fire during the years I lived in Venice, Italy, when I discovered the curious institution of the ballot boy within the Byzantine complexities of the thousand-year Venetian Republic. Since ballot boys were randomly chosen over a period of six hundred years, choosing my particular Doge and ballot boy required a survey of the entire field before I circled in on Venice, 1368, IMHO the peak brilliance of that maritime empire. It is a peculiarity of history that the names of all 130 doges of Venice are recorded, but none of their ballot boys are mentioned. The challenge was irresistible.
Barry, Irish, conjures a vision of the Civil War era American West that redefines the American experience.
A young Irish refugee fleeing the Great Famine which has wiped out his family, ends up in Missouri where he hooks up with another orphan and a lifelong love affair begins. The two boys survive by dressing as girls and entertaining at the local saloon in a town low on women.
As soon as they are old enough, they escape into the army, fighting in the Indian and Civil Wars, always together despite the amazing and terrible things that happen, steadfast in their love and their indomitable will to survive the crazy hand life has dealt them.
"A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making."—Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant
From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars
Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the…
