Alice Winn's Reading List

"It’s one of the classics of WW1 literature. It’s interesting that several of the novels I’ve chosen to recommend were written after the fact, by people who weren’t there. I think the reason it’s such a rich vein to draw on, for contemporary writers, is that we can so easily read first-hand accounts and then reconfigure that into literature, whereas that is obviously much less true for, you know, the Seventh Crusade. Regeneration is a war book that’s not really set in the war. I seem to remember Pat Barker saying that writing from the perspective of this doctor, Dr Rivers, who had also never been to war felt like a very honest place to start from. Dr Rivers specialises in shellshock. A lot of the methods they used on the soldiers returning seriously disturbed from their time at the front are, to our minds now, barbaric. It was just: shout at them until they behave. But what Dr Rivers was trying is much more recognisably modern, more like talk therapy. The book is a little bit about his relationship with his patients, in particular with Siegfried Sassoon. “The term ‘First World War’ started being used, in 1918 or 1920” The starting point of the book is, in 1917, Sassoon writes a letter condemning the war. This was a big deal as by then he was already a well-respected war poet, and had a medal for valour. So he couldn’t be easily dismissed as a coward. If an honoured soldier is saying this war is bad… that is very bad press for the war. So the book begins there, and it’s just a really fantastic read. It’s a good story, she’s an incredible writer—I mean, at a granular level, she uses punctuation really interestingly, and her dialogue feels incredibly vivid. I learned a lot about how to write historical fiction from this book, which I read after writing the first draft of In Memoriam . She doesn’t explain to you, the reader, what the world is like. She just drops you into it. So there will be tons and tons of references to things you don’t understand or know about. The characters will refer to someone as a “conchie”, and you just have to figure out that that means a conscientious objector, she doesn’t tell you that. And the characters are constantly exchanging pieces of news with each other, the way you do. So it feels really rich and vivid, as if you were there. It’s a very clever and engaging and wise book. I think quite closely. Pretty much all the physical facts of the plot happened. I went to Craiglockhart while I was writing my book. When you read accounts, like those of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon, they are always talking about how ugly it is, but I thought it was beautiful."

"I’ve recommended it because I think you have to. It’s considered one of the great classics. Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. I really admire him, he’s a very playful writer, I always enjoy him more than I expect to. But there is something so dudely bro-ish about him. I have to be in the right place for him. For most of the book I thought I liked it less than For Whom the Bell Tolls . I didn’t think it would place in my pantheon of novels-that-I-love. Then I read the ending. I’m not going to tell you much, but let me just say that the ending is one of the most spectacular pieces of writing. It’s mind-blowing. So, so good. And the writing is just… virtuosic. It’s like listening to Mozart. Incredible. It did. It has this very uncompelling insta-love—you know, man sees pretty woman, he is now in love with her—which I find very tiresome. But, as I said, it’s worth the read for the ending alone."

"Birdsong , I would almost say, is a quite straightforward depiction of war. It gets the job done. When I was trying to write a scene set at the Battle of the Somme, I remembered reading Birdsong when I was around twenty, and weeping at the hairdressers—which was quite uncomfortable, they were like: ‘Can you stop crying quite so much?’ So I looked back, re-read the Somme scene. And it was so perfectly written. You could not have changed a single word. Then I actually felt this sense of relief. I thought, oh well, if someone wants to read a perfect depiction of the Somme, then it exists already and I don’t have to worry about my depiction. I’m just adding to the depictions, there’s already a great one. So I felt freed by that. But then I also structured my depiction of the Somme significantly differently, because I thought: that’s been done perfectly, there’s no need to do it again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I read an interesting interview with Sebastian Faulks where he said he is impatient with characters in books where the author clearly loves the character and wants you to as well. And so just everyone in the fictional world loves the character. He said, he’s always very careful to make sure that quite a few people in the book don’t like the character he likes. So the protagonist is a character—who I find very likeable, because he’s a little bit of a modern sub-in, he sees the world a little as we would—who everyone within the book thinks is a bit of an odd fish. They just don’t connect with him, you know, and that makes him feel very three-dimensional. It also begins with this idyllic Edwardian romance, then breaks that up completely. It’s about the mining in the war, in these tunnels deep underground. It’s terrifying. Very vivid. I mean—have you read it? That’s something I like about Regeneration and Birdsong. I don’t think either of them are what you might dismissively call ‘worthy’. There are books that you slowly read to be a better person, you know. But both of these books are just cracking reads. You just tear through them. And they are incredible works of literature and art. I love when those two things combine."

"My copy, rather histrionically, advertises itself as ‘the greatest war novel of all time.’ I remember thinking, when I picked it up in a second-hand shop: that’s big promise. But I think it might be right. It’s pretty horrible, I almost don’t like to recommend it, because you have to be prepared for it. It’s hard to talk about, because it’s too sad. My favourite part is where Paul goes on leave, he’s 18 and he returns home, and in his bedroom he looks at his shelf full of books and he finds himself completely unable to feel the quiet rapture he used to feel when he looked at his own bookshelf. There’s that famous line: “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.” In another part of that leave, he goes to a beer garden, and there are all these old men talking about how to win the war. And he thinks to himself: these men don’t understand that the purpose of life is to sit in a beer garden and drink beer. They think it’s to win the war, but I’ve been to the war and I know that they are wrong. That’s a clumsy way of expressing it, but it’s very distressing and actually quite life-changing. The book gave me a permanent jolt in perspective. I think it jolted me out of a depression, too. I thought: Paul would tell me to buck up and enjoy myself, and he is right. So it’s a very beautiful and valuable thing to have read. If you’re even remotely interested in any war, this is the first book I would recommend you read. Sure. In Memoriam is set in an idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. The protagonists are Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. Gaunt is half-German, and has always been a bit out of step with his peers. He’s against the outbreak of war; he’s not actually a pacifist, but he thinks this particular war is going to be bad for the empire. His closest, maybe his only, friend at school is this incredibly popular boy, Ellwood, who is ethnically Jewish but culturally Christian, and is the opposite. He’s romantic and excited about the war. When I was describing the children from Edwardian school books, who can’t wait to go and fight when they grow up? He’s like that. So there’s this conflict between them in their friendship, where they completely disagree about what this war means for their future. The rest of the school agrees with Ellwood. They’re very excited when this war breaks out. “Wilfred Owen said: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity’” The other major plot point is that they are in love with each other, but neither of them realises; they think it’s unrequited. And they aren’t able to communicate how they feel because it’s 1914. Anyway, they both end up at the front together, where the love story comes to a head because everything becomes so raw and intense. The question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether they will both survive. I was trying not to write a novel. I’d written three, quite unsuccessfully. So I thought, right, I’m not doing that anymore. I was procrastinating writing a screenplay, and found out that my old boarding school had uploaded all of its newspapers from during the war years. I was in a war phase, you know? Reading Robert Graves. So I read all the newspapers from 1913 to 1919. They were these newspapers written for students by students. It was a weird experience to read them, because unlike all the war literature I had read before—written by someone who had been to a war, come back, processed their feelings, and was now repackaging it so that people could understand it—these were by people who were in the moment. It was obituaries written by 16-year-old boys about their 17-year-old friends, which all their friends would read before going to sign up themselves. So I read all these papers, got quite obsessive about them. You’d read a paper and there would be a lot of stuff that wasn’t that compelling. Then there would be three sentences that would just break your heart. I collected those, created a paper that was just filled with the things that hit me the hardest. I wasn’t really thinking. Then I just started writing, and it turned into a novel very fast. Most of the first draft was done in two weeks. Then I got stuck—it took about a year and a half to finish an edit. But it was the newspapers that were the impetus. What I was saying earlier about Vera Brittain wanting people to learn from her experiences—something you see again and again in these newspapers is: some 19-year-old gets killed, and in his obituary, his friend or his brother is like, ‘no one will ever forget his death.’ I found that so upsetting. I mean, of course, you can’t remember everyone who died in a war for all eternity, but there was something so tragic to me about how forgotten those newspapers were, when they must have been so important when they were written. Wilfred Owen said: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” I think that’s exactly what you’re saying: it’s that softness, beneath all this violence. That’s where, I think, what Wilfred Owen would call the poetry comes from."

"Absolutely. I read it in the original French, because I’m very erudite. No, it was really beautiful. But the reason I say so is that the protagonist in At Night All Blood is Black is Senegalese, and he can’t speak French. So the book is written in French, but the protagonist talks about how he can’t speak French. There’s an interesting passage where he talks about how translation is just a series of small lies that tell a big truth. So there’s a really weird, complex thing going on there with language, and that the translation of this French language book won the International Booker—it’s just all very meta. But that makes it sound like less of a good story than it is. I’m sure you already know this, but the premise is that it’s this soldier. He becomes very murderous at the front, and starts doing things like cutting off hands in no-man’s-land and bringing them back. At first his white superiors are like: that’s great, we need murderous soldiers. But the more he turns into a serial killer, the more his white superiors feel that, well okay, we did ask you to be a savage, but this is not quite what we meant. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The reason he’s like that is that he’s been completely broken by the things he’s had to do in this war, and especially by the loss of a friend. It’s also about how this man, who really has no business being in a wet French trench, is being completely distorted and ruined by this war. The people who brought him there, who intentionally crafted him into this savage beast are then so horrified by what he’s now turned into. It almost reads like a horror film. It’s very psychological. You really sympathise with him, right? Like you almost want him to successfully murder strange German men in the field. So it’s a very finely crafted book, beautifully woven together, and interesting from a genre perspective. I did. So these five books are the books you should read if you’ve never read any novels about the First World War. But if you’ve read those already, I have a few that are a little bit off the beaten track. The most readable of these is The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert , which was written, I think, in the 1920s. The premise of the book is that it’s a young man making the case for why the execution of his good friend for cowardice was an injustice. It’s a really, really well-written and a psychologically interesting read. It’s about these four or five British officers in Gallipoli, their petty politics. He’s really uninterested in writing about the battles—whenever there’s a battle he’ll say, ‘there was a battle, I’m not going to go into it, you can read about that kind of thing elsewhere.’ He talks about how, when you’re tired and hungry and scared, having someone annoying in your dugout can ruin your life. So this guy starts off really brave and honourable, then there’s another man who he keeps being stationed with, and they hate each other. It just drives him crazy. Combined with the war, it serves to drive him to a position where he, as they say, bottles it. And he’s executed. That’s not a spoiler, it begins by telling you that. It’s a book about the interpersonal relationships of these four or five men at the front. I would even call it, in some way, feminine. There’s a very funny bit where they get sent to the Western Front, having just been at Gallipolli, and they are like: this is so nice! They just can’t believe how great it is. I think this book should be much more widely read, because it’s a great piece of writing. Another WW1 novel that should be better known is Alf by Bruno Vogel. This was a cool find for me, because my book has a very strong epistolary element—Gaunt and Ellwood are always writing heartfelt letters. After I wrote the draft, I found Alf , which is by a German soldier writing in the 1920s. It’s about two gentle teenage boys who are in love. They’ve acted on it, they’re in a relationship, and one of them goes to the front. They then write each other a series of letters to each other. It’s a very emotional book. The problem I have is that the only translation we have is about fifty years old, and it’s really bad—apologies to the translator, but I wish we had a modern translation. It was repressed by Hitler , so that’s one reason that no one knows about it. Bruno Vogel went on to live in South Africa, where he fought Apartheid for most of his life. He was a very cool guy. Then there’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer , by Siegfried Sassoon. He wrote three autobiographical novels and three memoirs about his experiences during the war. They’re quite slow-paced, but this is the one I’d recommend—the second of the three novels. He’s a wordsmith, the writing is just exquisitely poetic. It’s filled with insight. There’s one bit where he says: “I knew that if I could get the better of my physical discomforts I should find the War intensely interesting.” He has all sorts of little asides like that. It’s also heart-rending, because he’s quite unfair to the character that is him. He’s always talking in the first person about what a loser he is, basically, and you feel he’s being a bit hard on himself, on pseudo-Sassoon. So I find it a very touching book. The last one I would recommend, and this is less good writing than interesting historical document, is Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini. It was pretty quickly banned when it first came out, in 1918. It’s about this bisexual woman who falls in love with a gay pacifist during World War One. So it’s really quite radical. In fact, to someone reading in the 21st century, it seems very modern—there are a lot of scenes of a bunch of Bohemians at a café, exchanging political views, and the political views are basically ours. So it’s fascinating, it feels very dissonant—you think: don’t put modern thoughts into these historical characters’ heads, and then you remember, oh it’s from the time. It’s brazenly queer, which is not the reason it was banned. It was banned because of the pacifism. So although I think it fails on a literary scale, because it’s quite didactic, it’s really a fascinating insight into a group of radical thinkers in this time period."