War & Military Fiction
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All the World
The Great War is over and the soldier boys are back home, but some of them just can’t settle down again. Neither can the girls who helped out both on the foreign and the home front. Dr. Ward notices, but doesn’t know how to help until one Sunday after his sermon, when something happens to change the lives of many in their town. Summary by Adele de Pignerolles.
Blake of the “Rattlesnake”
Fred Jane, who later went on to publish his famous “Jane’s Fighting Ships”, doubtless was noting the success of other books that forecast a British defeat in the event of war in the late 19th century when he wrote this fictional account of “The Man Who Saved England.” Jane tells of a possible war against both France and Russia with plenty of verve and derring-do amid naval battles, both small and large. – Summary by Mark
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (?Adieu?), Balzac adds to the 19th century?s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, confined in her madness; mute, or eerily chanting in her moated grange. The first Mrs Rochester lurks in the wings; the Lady of Shalott waits for the shadowy reflection of the world outside to shatter her illusion. Freud?s earliest patients will soon enter the waiting-room in their turn. Whilst out hunting two friends come across a strange waif-like woman shut up in a decaying chateau which one of them dubs ?the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty?. Soon we are dragged back to the terrible masculine reality of the 1812 retreat of Napoleon?s army from Moscow and the grotesque massacre that was to traumatise the heroine, parting her from her lover. Their reunion is more desperate still, as the earlier event is recreated in a bizarre and vain attempt to root out madness and compel the return of happiness? (Summary by Martin Geeson)
First World War Centenary Prose Collection Vol. I
This collection of non-fiction and fiction, with its companion poetry collection, commemorates the outbreak of the First World War on 28th July 1914. The majority of the items, all chosen by the readers, are in English, but the collection also includes pieces in Dutch, French, German and Ukrainian. Please note that some works are still protected by copyright in countries which observe copyright laws based on the author’s date of death. Most items were written during or shortly after the war, but one or two have been included for their relevance in other ways. For more information about each piece, please see this document (PDF format), which also shows the authors’ dates of death. (Summary by Ruth Golding)
First World War Centenary Prose Collection Vol. II
This collection of non-fiction and fiction pieces is the second volume commemorating the First World War. The majority of the items, all chosen by the readers, are in English, but the collection also includes pieces in French and German. Please note that some works are still protected by copyright in countries which observe copyright laws based on the author’s date of death. Most items were written during or shortly after the war, but one or two have been included for their relevance in other ways. For more information about each piece, please see this document (PDF format), which also shows the authors’ dates of death. (Summary by Ruth Golding)
First World War Centenary Prose Collection Vol. III
This collection of non-fiction and fiction pieces is the third volume commemorating the First World War. The majority of the items, all chosen by the readers, are in English, but the collection also includes pieces in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Please note that some works are still protected by copyright in countries which observe copyright laws based on the author’s date of death. Most items were written during or shortly after the war, but one or two have been included for their relevance in other ways. For more information about each piece, please see this document (PDF format), which also shows the authors’ dates of death. (Summary by Ruth Golding)
The Angel of the Revolution
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) is a science fiction novel by English writer George Griffith. It was his first published novel and remains his most famous work. It was first published in Pearson’s Weekly and was prompted by the success of The Great War of 1892 in Black and White magazine, which was itself inspired by The Battle of Dorking. A lurid mix of Jules Verne’s futuristic air warfare fantasies, the utopian visions of News from Nowhere and the future war invasion literature of Chesney and his imitators, it tells the tale of a group of terrorists who conquer the world through airship warfare. Led by a crippled, brilliant Russian Jew and his daughter, the ‘angel’ Natasha, ‘The Brotherhood of Freedom’ establish a ‘pax aeronautica’ over the earth after a young inventor masters the technology of flight in 1903. The hero falls in love with Natasha and joins in her war against society in general and the Russian Czar in particular. It correctly forecasts the coming of a great war, but in pretty well all other respects widely misses the mark of the real events that followed. Nevertheless, it is a gripping and exciting story of intrigue and plot interwoven with love and romance played over a background of world war. – Summary by Wikipedia
The Black Arrow
In the unsettled years of England’s War of the Roses, where a man stood on the issue of kingship could make his fortune… or end his life. Dick Shelton, a nobly-born lad, is on the cusp of manhood, and he is thrust bodily into this stew where allegiances shift under one’s feet. Circumstances cause him to fall in with a gentlemaiden in boy’s disguise. Until he learns of the deception, Dick is unaware that the young lady is an heiress whom his guardian Sir Daniel had kidnapped. And the introduction of an outlaw with a penchant for putting black arrows into the bodies of the men who had wronged him affords Dick a worrying hint – that Sir Daniel might have been the man that had murdered Dick’s father! – Summary by Mark F. Smith
The Blockade Runners
Writing at the end of the American Civil War, Verne weaves this story of a Scottish merchant who, in desperation at the interruption of the flow of Southern cotton due to the Union blockade, determines to build his own fast ship and run guns to the Confederates in exchange for the cotton piling up unsold on their wharves. His simple plan becomes complicated by two passengers who board his new ship under false pretenses in order to carry out a rescue mission, one which Capt. Playfair adopts as his own cause. This is going make the Rebels in Charleston rather unhappy with him.
The False Faces
This is the second book in the Lone Wolf series. Michael Lanyard had turned his back on his career as gentleman-thief and started a respectable life, when World War I wrecks his life. With his family dead and the spy Ekstrom alive after all, his special skills as the Lone Wolf are needed once more, this time in the war behind enemy lines. But again, there is a mysterious woman involved… (Summary by Carolin)