The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

John Bartle and Daniel Murphy are soldiers, no more than boys who signed up from their homes in rural Virginia to fight their country's war in Al Tafar, Iraq in 2005.   Bartle's first person narrative alternates between his experiences in Iraq and the year after his return to Virginia.  Powers' describes Bartle's increasing sense that although he was the only one to return from Iraq in a very real sense both he and Murphy died out there.  Powers speaks with painful beauty of the heat and dust of Iraq, the emotions suppressed as he killed not just men but also women and children, and how the trauma reduced him to a walking ghost on his return, unable to reconnect with those around him, plagued by flashbacks.  Powers' description of the true nature of depression is one of the best I have ever read and this is to my mind as beautiful an elegy for what is lost in war as Sassoon.

Jackdaw Summer by David Almond

It's summer, and it's hot. Liam is on the edge of his teenage years, wandering with his best friend Max through his coutry Northumberland home town in a landscape rural and idyllic but defined by conflict, Border Reivers, Romans, soldiers on exercises and jets screaming overhead as Blair and Bush take the UK into war in the Middle East, trying to avoid the savage bully Nattrass.

They are playing in the garden when Liam digs up an old knife and indulges in the fantasy of it being an ancient relic. But a chattering jackdaw yelling at them as they wander the village seems far more intent, they follow it and find an abandoned months old baby. Taking it home they become overnight celebrities and the baby changes their lives in small ways, like the pebbles that start an avalanche.

As the baby, now named Alison, is fostered Max and Liam begin to grow apart as their interests diverge, and visiting Alison brings Max into contact with foster children Crystal, orphaned by fire, and Oliver, a Liberian war refugee. Liam is largely left to his own devices by his writer father and artist mother and the bruising war games he plays with the other boys of the village lead to the climax in the hills above the village.

Almond writes with a deceptive simplicity, the narrative is told by Liam and has the directness of a young boy's experiences, but there is a complex web of themes and nuances about war, savagery, responsibility, conflict, innocence and childhood.

Metamaus by Art Spiegelman

I learned so much in this book. I knew that Maus had affected me deeply and that it wasn't just to do with the subject matter, but in MetaMaus I felt I really came to an understanding of the level of craft Spiegelman put into his work. Spiegelman speaks about the different levels of his books, the overt subject of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, but also the framing narrative of intergenerational misuderstandings and conflict, that being a survivor of the Holocaust doesn't make you perfect, and of the deep reasons for the use of animal models that reflected how Nazis themselves propagandised about Jews. I learned about the symbolism and movement of the panels across each page and Spiegelman's own struggle to express his ambivalism about his family history. I didn't think I could respect Spiegelman more that I did, but I do now. A wonderful piece, not just about Maus but about the history and methodology of the comic medium.

Dougie's War by Rodge Glass


Dougie Campbell has just returned from the war in Afghanistan. At first he does everything he has dreamed of, climbs a munro, goes to see Scotland play football at Hampden Park, and gets bought rounds and rounds of drinks by strangers and friends all of whom hail him as a hero. But as he is forgotten by the people around him and moves into a flat and life of his own the trauma he suffered as the sole survivor of an explosion that tore apart his jeep and the bodies of his friends emerges and takes over. A really good primer on the true cost of modern soldiering, on PTSD and the lack of support for returning soldiers, and with an in depth section on PTSD, the war in Afghanistan, the World War I comic strip Charley's War that first spoke about the reality of life for soldiers on the western front. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is that I feel it lack the subtlety and quality of drawing of Charley's War, but it is much shorter.

The Best of Battle by Titan Books

A great selection from the Battle war comic, including a wide range of different types of comic, World War I, II and Vietnam along with some from the German and Russian viewpoints.

Yaxley's Cat by Robert Westall, The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall, Before Wings by Beth Goobie & What I Was by Beth Rosoff

These four books are all children's ficition, the first two for slightly younger readers than the latter two.  It strikes me that for children's fiction to work the parentals have to be got rid of, Yaxley's Cat doesn't, for me, work because it is written not from the point of view of the two children who, frankly, come across as pretty awful, but from their mother's point of view. 

Having loved his Blitzcat I liked the look of the story in Yaxley's Cat, mother on holiday with two children exploring in Norfolk come across an abandoned cottage and get permission to live in it.  They are soon joined a cat that they find out belonged to the previous owner, Yaxley.  As they find out more about the mysterious Mr Yaxley, his unexplained disappearance years earlier and as they meet the people of the local village horror and the terrible truth begin to be revealed.

In The Kingdom by the Sea Westall draws on his childhood experiences during World War II.  Harry has just made the run down his garden from his house in Newcastle to the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden when a bomb makes a direct hit on his house and, pulled from the wreckage of the shelter, he takes off, reluctant to live with his repugnant Aunt Elsie.  Grief stricken he draws on the common sense drilled into him by his Air Warden father and finds shelter under a boat on a beach and company in the figure of a lost dog that, without him, would be put down.  Like a pilgrim he moved steadily north along the Northumberland coastline to Holy Island, meeting a wonderful range of characters and having to leave as people begin asking questions about him or paying him unwanted attention, until after a disastorous trip to Lindisfarne where he finds himself cut off by the tide crossing the causeway he finally finds refuge with a man broken by the loss of his son in Malay at only age 18.  But the refuge is not permanent, and Westall's powers in this book are at their height, deliniating Harry's experiences exquisitely.

In Before Wings 15 year old Adrien's release from her parents is through them leaving her with her aunt Erin at summer camp, freed to discover the usual teenage book preoccupation of dawning love and challenging emotions, but with the added element that Adrien had a near fatal brain aneurysm two years earlier and ever since has been stuck between the worlds of the living and dead, able to see the dead and perilously close to joining them.  In Before Wings Adrien learns to live again rather than just waiting for the weakened blood vessels in her brain to give again, and observes and solves the mystery of the five girl ghosts haunting the summer camp and her aunt.  Well written.

Lastly, in What I Was the release come through being at boarding school and is the memories of a Hilary, a man in old age remembering events in 1962 when he met and fell in love with Finn, a boy his own age living alone in a tiny hut on an island near by his school.  The fact that it is clear that the man writing this memoir is recalling personal history with deep pain and regret adds to the aching tenderness of this powerful story and the sense that tragedy is sure to strike long before it does.

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpugo

Morpugo's most famous text, beautifully written and heart wrenching

AZ: "Heroism or cowardice? A stunning story of the First World War from a master storyteller. Told in the voice of a young soldier, the story follows 24 hours in his life at the front during WW1, and captures his memories as he looks back over his life. Full of stunningly researched detail and engrossing atmosphere, the book leads to a dramatic and moving conclusion. Both a love story and a deeply moving account of the horrors of the First World War, this book will reach everyone from 9 to 90."

The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpugo

Written for young readers, short and utterly beautiful

AZ (MM): "The Butterfly Lion grew from several magical roots: The memories of a small boy who tried to run away from school a long time ago; a book about a pride of white lions discovered by Chris McBride; a chance meeting in a lift with Virginia McKenna, actress and champion of lions and all creatures born free; a true story of a soldier of the First World War who rescued some circus animals in France from certain death; and the sighting from a train of a white horse carved out on a chalky hillside near Westbury in Wiltshire."

On Hitler's Mountain: My Nazi Childhood by Irmgard Hunt

AZ: "Irmgard Hunt was born in Nazi Germany and brought up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, just outside the fence that surrounded Hitler's alpine retreat. At the age of three, she was photographed sitting on the Fuhrer's knee - one of her parents' proudest moments. Irmgard grew up innocently accepting the Nazi doctrine, believing the lies of her teachers and joyfully singing anthems to National Socialism. In simple, powerful prose Hunt reveals the creeping Nazification of Germany and shows how ordinary people were seduced - and cowed - by the campaigns set in train by their leaders."

I got this for S as we visited the Eagle's Nest and Berchtesgarten I was interested in this book. An amazing story about growing up in Nazi Bavaria, a traditional life which differs not that greatly from alpine Austrian life today, and the indocrinations, food shortages and final defeats of WWII. To me, as important a chronicle as Carrie's War and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I felt brought an understanding of why Nazism flourished better than The Reader

Day by AL Kennedy

AZ: "Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and – most extraordinary of all – he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that’s all gone now – the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too.
Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget..."

As usual Kennedy finds an extraordinary angle and writes with devastatingly painful accuracy

In the Second Year by Storm Jameson

Read this for the book group after picking it out on Amazon, having been recommended it because I'd read Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night. Although it was about the rise of facism I found the pace irritatingly slow and the plot plodding, I could excuse it being written in the 30s and for a different world, but then so was Burdekin.

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

I read Hosseini's Kite Runner and was worried that it might have been a one hit wonder and that his second book wouldn't have been as good. It was. A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on the lives of two women from very different castes and to me Hosseini can write a woman's thoughts and feelings, I was enchanted and captivated.

AZ: "Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism".

Tamar by Mal Peet

AZ: "When Tamar's grandfather, an intensely private man, falls from a balcony to his death, he leaves behind a box with Tamar's name on it. For a long time Tamar refuses even to think about it...until one hot June day she opens it to reveal a series of clues and hidden messages from her grandfather. She and her cousin Johannes follow the clues and discover that her name also belonged to someone else over half a century before; someone involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Second World War. As she pieces together the mystery her grandfather left behind, another Tamar's story is unravelled; a story of passionate love, jealousy and tragedy played out amongst the daily fear and horror of war"

Seem to be drawn to war stories at the moment, this one shifting between the Resistance and SOE operations in the occupied Netherlands and the SOE operatives' grandchild Tamar. I understood the switching between the presnt and past as a technique to engage current teenagers but felt the SOE story was powerful enough to stand alone. Good twist I just did not see coming.

The Penalty by Mal Peet

AZ: "As the city of San Juan pulses to summer's sluggish beat, its teenage football prodigy El Brujito, the Little Magician, vanishes without trace. Paul Faustino, South America's top sports journalist, is reluctantly drawn into the mystery. As a story of corruption and murder unfolds, he is forced to confront a bitter history of slavery, and the power of the occult."

Odd, about football and the occult, found it too foreign to take to

Sisterland by Linda Newberry

AZ: "Hilly's German grandmother, HeidiGran, comes to live with her family after she gets Alzheimer's disease; but as her mind becomes more muddled, secrets buried in her past start to emerge. Why does HeidiGran keep talking about a girl called Rachel? And why does she make racist remarks about Hilly's friend, Reuben? As Hilly struggles to cope with revelations about her family's past, she encounters racism and prejudice for herself when a friend becomes the victim of a mindless attack; she also falls in love for the first time."

Have read a couple of books by Newberry and found them intellgent explorations of mid to late teen life. Sisterland is the book I would like Cj to learn about the Holocaust through almost as much as The Diary of Anne Frank. The grandmother of the main character appears to be the only survivor of a German family but as Heidigran's Alzheimer's takes hold she reveals more and more of her past by acting as if she is there again. A book that links the Holocaust and resulting diaspora and the current issues of Israel and Palenstine with sensitivity and never allowing lapse into stereotypes, via racism and anti-Muslim feeling in the UK.

The Element of Water by Stevie Davies

AZ: "In pre-war Germany, two boys grow up together inseparable. However, as adulthood approaches and Nazism continues its inexorable march, Dahl and Quantz can no longer reconcile their childhood friendship as one becomes an SS officer and the other a pawn in the intelligence unit. Thirteen years later, their children meet: a woman and a man exposed to the sins of their fathers."

Found this a very long read. Interesting enough story, about the daughter of an Aryan Nazi deathshead and son of another solider forming a relationship after the war in a former SS hq but just lacked pace and interest for me. Didn't really sympathise with either character and felt there may be better books on the legacy of the war.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

AZ: "Set before and during the great war, "Birdsong" captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. His life goes through a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself."

Often heard people say this was brilliant but never attempted it because I'd already read one book on the effects of World War I on the minds of people (2 actually, Pat Barker's Regeneration which I either didn't get or found overrated, and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier which I found too good to want to read anything else on the subject) but then I read Engelby via the book group and was captivated by Faulks and decided to begin with the French trilogy of which Birdsong is the first novel. Plus, reverse snobbery I guess.

Birdsong is brilliant, I wanted so much to know more, hear more about the characters and yet opening as it does in 1910 knowing the Great War is only 4 years away and will come down like the wolf on the town of Amiens gives us a kind of narratorial omniscience and curiosity about characters so immersed in their lives and the politics of the fabric industry, unknowing unlike Damocles that the sword is about to fall on their head.

Blitzcat by Robert Westall

AZ: "She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea. She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives...From her beginning to her end she never wavered. She was the Blitzcat"

Realised when reading this have read it before but don't mind because very good, about a cat called Lord Gort psi tracking her (yes her) master during WWII and the people she meets and affects, written in third person but with a real feeling of dwelling in the cat's mind and with powerful descriptions of the bombing destruction of Coventry, life in Britain during WWII and what it was psychologically to be alive at that time, grieving, fearful, damaged, lonely, worn out, living with the very real threat of invasion at the time of Dunkirk/kerque.