The best books about surviving wars written by women

This is a harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda told by one of its survivors, Imaculee llibagiza, after Hutu soldiers murdered her father, mother, and two brothers during a killing spree that took the lives of a million Rwandans.

In a fight for survival, Imaculee and seven other women took refuge in a 3’ by 3’ bathroom hidden behind a wardrobe in a pastor’s home. As the machete-wielding gunmen continued hunting for more victims, Imaculee and the women remained in their cloister in silence. Her  91 days in hiding is a testimony of endurance and resilience in the face of unrestrained evil.

When everyone you love is dead, and everything you love is lost, how do you go on? Imaculee found the answer in faith, love, forgiveness, and optimism. It is a haunting story of an ordinary woman and earthly mortal forced into an enlightening spiritual experience with the divine in order to save her own life and those of her companions.

As most Western media, from CNN on down, parroted the Bush administration’s talking points on the Iraq War, intellectually curious Americans turned to blogs written by Iraqis who gave first-person accounts of the war. I was riveted by the blogs of a 24-year-old Iraqi woman, an engineer, who posted under the pseudonym Riverbend, “I’m female, Iraqi, and 24. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway,” she wrote in her first post on Aug. 17, 2003.

From 2003 to 2004, Riverbend wrote prolifically about life under American Occupation. The blogs were compiled into this book in 2005. Riverbend cataloged and chronicled life in wartime—a litany of rations of food, water, gas, and electricity; bombings, raids, and kidnappings; and the emotional and financial toll on her family as their ordinary middle-class lives were destroyed by the war.

Intelligent and opinionated, Riverbend gave a comprehensive testimony on a daily basis, when internet service allowed, of life under occupation. I worried about Riverbend when days went by, and she didn’t post a blog and I was always relieved when she would post an update weeks later.

Her last post in the book, dated October 22, 2007, narrates her and her family’s arrival in Syria as refugees. Riverbend went silent after that post and book entry and was feared to have died. I was happy to learn that she was alive in 2013, ten years after America’s manufactured “War on Terror” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” that killed more than 200,000 Iraqis. Riverbend had lived as a refugee, first in Syria and later in another Arab country.

The book is a searing account of the war from the Iraqi perspective. Women’s voices are rarely heard in war narratives, which made Riverbend’s witness accounts profound and compelling. This is an important book—the most insightful testimony about the impact of the Iraq War on civilians by a citizen of Iraq.

As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages in 2024, Palestinian writers shed light on the trauma and violence of dispossession and colonization in this anthology translated from Arabic to English.

Through the controlled, curated form of poetry, eminent authors Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and Fadwa Tuqan join emerging writers, several of them women, in narrating the Palestinian experience from 1948, the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) to today.

This book is about geography and identity, the ground beneath one’s feet and belonging, origins and history, displacement, and diaspora. There is longing everywhere in the book for what was lost—home, family, tribe, community, and culture. There is also the plight of powerlessness, occupation, and enslavement. The words that express the loss and mourning of the Palestinian people are haunting and memorable, perhaps because they are translated from Arabic, a flowery and lyrical language.

When we hear about 33,000 dead Palestinian civilians, cognitive dissonance prevents us from seeing them as distinct and individual humans who insist on autonomy and freedom as we do. These poets allow us into their arteries, veins, and capillaries to see and hear the beating hearts of a colonized, occupied, and enslaved people.  

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia and pro-Russian forces tried to reclaim Ukraine through armed conflict after it declared independence in 1991. More than 500,000 people died in consecutive wars from 2014, among them Volodymyr Pavliv, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces who died of shrapnel wounds in 2017. His sister, Olesya Khromeychuk, a historian, scholar, and director of the Ukrainian Institute of London, narrates her brother’s death in this meditation on grief and war.

As a memoirist, she reveals the nuances of her brother, at once patriotic, brave, complicated, and difficult. Her reflections on his splintered life add color and humanity to a flawed yet loved brother. Her portrayal of her own and her family’s grief is tender and wrenching. However, given her unique stature as a Ukrainian historian, this most personal book about the human cost of war also serves as a study of the Ukrainian people, their homeland, and their stubborn refusal to surrender to Russia.

In a larger sense, the book is about patriotism, united resistance to authoritarianism, and the psyche of an iconoclastic people invested in democratic principles and values. Olesya Khromeychuk’s elegy to her brother is an unflinching look at her irredeemable loss and the insanity of war.

Le Li Hayslip’s wrenching memoir traces the arc of the Vietnam War as she experienced it, first as a 12-year-old, then through her teens and twenties, and finally as an American returning to her homeland.

Her tranquil childhood in a rural village explodes into smithereens with the arrival of American troops, followed by warring between the trifecta of government, Viet Cong, and the US military. This being war, children and civilians were viewed as battleground assets and recruited as spies, agitators, and saboteurs.

Le Li was one of the recruits and suffered every imaginable horror of war except death. Her resilience as a child, teenager, and woman as she endured the seemingly unendurable and unspeakable is a testament to faith and hope in humanity. Le Li Hayslip’s body was a container and reliquary for the atrocities of the Vietnam War. That she outlived her sorrow and suffering is nothing short of miraculous.