Twelve books about war and empire
Fiction and reportage from the century in which Britain and the United States became global powers, and from the places that power was exercised. Some of these books are complicit in what they describe; that is part of why they are worth reading.
The list
- The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane, 1895. The first modern American war novel, written by a man who had never seen a battle.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859. Dickens writing at speed and with unusual restraint, about a city learning how quickly a revolution can eat its own.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells, 1898. The founding invasion narrative, written with a journalist's eye for what a disaster actually feels like.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Thirty-Nine Steps — John Buchan, 1915. The first modern chase thriller, and still one of the fastest books in the genre.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Kim — Rudyard Kipling, 1901. Kipling's best novel, and the most vivid picture of British India in fiction.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894. The best children's book about rules, and a masterclass in short-form storytelling.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places — Rudyard Kipling, 1891. Early Kipling on the machinery of a colonial city, sharper and less sentimental than his later work.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore, 1912. Devotional poetry that changed the way English readers thought about Indian writing.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - King Solomon's Mines — H. Rider Haggard, 1885. A fast, unapologetic adventure that shows exactly how the imperial imagination worked.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Story of an African Farm — Olive Schreiner, 1883. The first great South African novel, and still the most quoted one.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Bible in Spain — George Borrow, 1843. A swaggering, unreliable travel classic about selling books in a country that did not want them.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Edgar Allan Poe, 1838. Poe's strange, unfinished sea novel: uneven, influential and genuinely unsettling.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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