Additional Recommended Reading [ Edited ]

[Jessica]

Additional Recommended Reading

Regeneration
Pat Barker
Book 1 of Barker's WWI trilogy. In 1917, Seigfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in WWI. His reason: The war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital where a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. Sasson's story is of a battle for a man's mind, in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim.

The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker
Book 2 of Barker's WWI trilogy. In 1918 England, two groups are targeted for persecution: pacifists and homosexuals. Billy Prior, recently released from treatment for shell shock by psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, is in London working for a domestic Intelligence unit. He investigates an imprisoned female pacifist, who turns out to be the woman who raised him as a child. Meanwhile, Prior has begun a secret relationship with Charles Manning, an upperclass officer. And as soldier scarred by the horror of war but loyal to the men in the trenches, he is torn in two as he is asked to take sides.

The Ghost Road
Pat Barker
Book 3 of Barker's WWI trilogy. Lieutenant Billy Prior is determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase. Dr. Rivers is consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back to the battlefields and almost certain death. With or without his doctor's blessing, Prior seeks to join the poet Wilfred Owen in France in time to participate in the great English offensive, the "one last push" intended to redeem all the shining heroism and senseless slaughter that has gone before.

No Angel
Penny Vincenzi
Vincenzi writes a family saga starring Celia Lytton, a smart, ambitious woman working against stereotype during World War I. In the opening scene, when the reader finds out Celia has purposely gotten pregnant so that her aristocratic parents will let her marry Oliver Lytton, the reader knows that this is a woman who gets her way. Vincenzi takes us through 20 years in Celia's life, using historical moments as background and introducing us to wonderful supporting characters, such as her strong-willed sister-in-law, LM, and her outspoken mother, the Countess of Beckenham. (Library Journal)

A Test of Wills
Charles Todd
The Great War has been won, but victory has its price. The year is 1919, and Ian Rutledge has returned to London to resume his position as Scotland Yard inspector, bringing nightmares and ghosts home with him from the French battlefields. Tormented and suffering from shell shock, he is immediately plunged into the affair of a popular colonel believed murdered by a decorated war hero -- a case that is a personal and political minefield that could destroy Rutledge's career and what remains of his sanity.

A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
This is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war. His description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- adds to this story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, and a new romanticism for Hemingway.

The Air We Breathe
Andrea Barrett
In Fall 1916, Americans debate whether to enter the European war. "Preparedness parades" march and headlines report German spies. But in an isolated town in the Adirondacks, the danger is barely felt. At Tamarack Lake the focus is on the sick. Wealthy tubercular patients live in private cure cottages; charity patients, mainly immigrants, fill the public sanatorium. An enterprising patient initiates a discussion group, and when his well-meaning efforts lead instead to a tragic accident and a terrible betrayal, the war comes home, bringing with it anti-immigrant prejudice and vigilante sentiment.

The Man from St. Petersburg
Ken Follett
His name was Feliks. He came to London to commit a murder that would change history. A master manipulator, he had many weapons at his command, but against him were ranged the whole of the English police, a brilliant and powerful lord, and the young Winston Churchill himself. These odds would have stopped any man in the world -- except the man from St. Petersburg.

Message Edited by Jessica on 03-18-2008 11:55 AM