The top 10 books about returning from war

US marines veteran Phil Klay, whose short story collection about the Iraq war won a National book award, chooses his favourite books about homecoming after conflict

I’ve spent years trying to untangle my feelings about returning from war, and I’m hardly the only veteran writer to do so. In his roundup of the fiction and poetry coming out of the Iraq and Afghan wars, US journalist George Packer declared the return home to be the “moment of truth” for modern war fiction, in the same way that scenes of mass slaughter in the trenches were for the first world war and patrols through the jungle were for Vietnam. But those earlier conflicts had their own fraught homecomings as well. Here are some of the books that helped me think things through.

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