Recommendations
Books Like All Quiet on the Western Front
What to read after All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is the great anti-war novel — Paul Bäumer and his classmates on the German Western Front, finding not glory but systematic destruction of everything young and human. If you were moved by its controlled rage and its grief for a generation destroyed, these novels live in the same territory.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Published the same year as All Quiet (1929), on the same subject from the Allied side — Hemingway's iceberg prose is the formal opposite of Remarque's directness, but both novels reach the same conclusion about what the war did to the people who survived it
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's Lost Generation novel — expatriates in Paris and Pamplona who cannot reconnect to life after the war; where All Quiet shows the wound being inflicted, The Sun Also Rises shows what it looks like a decade later
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
A Vietnam veteran's account of what his unit carried — literally and emotionally — through the war; written fifty years after All Quiet, it asks the same questions about what war does to young men and whether fiction can tell the truth about it that facts cannot
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
An American bombardier's experience of World War Two through satire and absurdism — Heller's approach is the opposite of Remarque's, but he is indicting the same thing: the system that processes young men into casualties while generals eat well and write memos
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
A survivor of the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 who becomes unstuck in time — Vonnegut's response to the war he survived; like All Quiet, it refuses the narrative of glorious sacrifice and insists on the view from the ground, where war is just organized killing
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Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
An English officer in the trenches of World War One and the decades-later effort of his granddaughter to understand what happened — one of the most fully realized portraits of the Western Front in any fiction written in English; structured differently from All Quiet but reaching the same emotional place
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Goodbye to All That
by Robert Graves
The English poet's memoir of the Western Front, published the same year as All Quiet (1929) — the most famous British first-person account of the Great War; shorter and less formally polished than Remarque, but direct testimony from the same experience
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Regeneration
by Pat Barker
The first novel of the Regeneration Trilogy — Dr. W. H. R. Rivers treating shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart War Hospital in 1917, including the poet Siegfried Sassoon; interested in what the war does to the mind, where Remarque is interested in what it does to the body; one of the most intelligent novels about the Great War in English
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