10 Great War Books Written by Women

by Emily Temple. Flavorpill -  Tuesday Sep 11, 2012

A lot of people, when put on the spot, would be hard pressed to come up with a book about war written by a woman. After all, when we think of great war novels, we think of Hemingway, Vonnegut, Heller, O’Brien, Wouk, and their ilk. It makes sense: for a long time war (at least the war that took place on the battlefield) was solely the purview of men, so it stands to reason they would be largely the ones to write about it. But they are not, by any means, the only ones. Today, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, Shani Boianjiu’s excellent debut novel about teenage girls serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, hits stands, and we liked it so much that we’ve put together a list of a few more great war books (we’ve limited ourselves to fiction — except for one cheat book) penned by women. Read through our list after the jump. let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments.


The People of Forever are Not Afraid, Shani Boianjiu
Though we picked up this book, the tale of three teenagers’ experiences in the Israeli Defense Forces, on the promise that it was a little like Mean Girls meets The Things They Carried, we loved it for being a little bit more like Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? meets, well, The Things They Carried. Irreverent, sometimes touching and often deeply weird, we fell in love with Boinajiu’s voice from the first page. Bottom line? It sucked us in and carried us off at gunpoint.
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Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky
Not only is this book phenomenal, but the story behind it is incredible: Irène Némirovsky, a bestselling Jewish author living in Paris, finished writing this novel (really two novels out of a planned five novel set) about the city at the start of the Nazi occupation just months before being shipped off to Auschwitz, where she died. The book, first published some six decades after Némirovsky’s death, explores the war in France on a human, individual level — and is so good that those three unfinished sections haunt us to this day.

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

But of course. Margaret Mitchell’s classic romance novel about love, the American Civil War, and the incomparable Scarlett O’Hara still inspires and enthralls today. Frankly my dear… oh, we won’t go on.

The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli
Another debut novel, Soli’s beautiful work chronicles the story of a female photojournalist in Vietnam, hooked on the war and on the love of two men (the title refers to the Greek myth of an island people addicted to the narcotic of the lotus flower). Dangerous in more ways than one and rendered in exquisite language, we think it’s safe to say that this book is one of the best novels written about the Vietnam war, period. -

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