The best books about civilians in war

This book made me think differently about air war, arguably the defining element of 20th and 21st-century conflicts. Grayzel traces its evolution and experience for Britain from the first bombing raids of the First World War to the start of the blitz in the Second. Unlike most other studies, which focus on military strategy and state policy, she interweaves the stories and experiences of the civilians who were to be the targets of this new technology. The book reminds us (if we needed reminding) of the shock of air raids, and the way that these impacted every aspect of life.

It is all too easy to forget that when Britain went to war in 1939, it did so as the world’s largest imperial power. Khan’s book is a rich social history of India at war, telling us the stories of not only the soldiers, but the business owners, the peasants, the refugees, and the political activists whose lives were shaped by war in the Indian subcontinent. The flawed political settlement that brought independence and partition to India and Pakistan was born out of the Raj’s experience of war, and this book gives voice to those who experienced this most turbulent time in the region’s recent history.

A sweeping novel of the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War,’ told through the lives of the fictional Shaposikova family, but with historical figures including Hitler and Stalin making guest appearances. Grossman was a journalist and war reporter, but the novel, which was critical of Stalin, was not published until 1980. The book ranges widely, taking in life (and death) in Soviet cities, gulags, and—in the book’s most devastating passages—German concentration camps. Weaving together individual stories with grand events, the novel is a cry for the small acts of kindness and resistance that individuals are capable of in the most extreme circumstances. Life and Fate is the sequel to Grossman’s Stalingrad but with a wider canvas. I particularly enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 adaptation, (available as an audiobook).

A clever, playful, moving novel that is not strictly about civilians in war, but which has their experiences at its heart. It tells and retells the lives of Ursula Todd, whose life begins again each time she dies. In several of these lives Ursula volunteers as an Air Raid Warden in blitzed London, and in another, she (having married unwisely to a German man in the 1930s) tries to keep her daughter alive in a devastated Berlin.  ‘Spanish Flu’ repeatedly devastates Ursula’s family, reminding us that victims of the pandemic were among the dead of war. Atkinson clearly spent time in the archives while writing this and it shows in the historical accuracy and attention to detail that shapes Ursula’s multiple stories. I have read this book again and again and always find something new to appreciate.

This isn’t an easy read, but it’s an important one. A diary by an anonymous female journalist trapped in Berlin as bombs fall and the Red Army closes in, it describes in graphic detail her struggle for survival between April and June 1945. Berlin’s women had difficult choices to make in this period, and the author records unflinchingly her decision to choose the ‘protection’ of one Russian soldier over repeated rape by multiple others. It is one of the few books that tell us about war from the perspective of civilian women, immersing us in their world and recording the impact of political leaders’ delusions of grandeur and glory on individual lives. I didn’t find this an easy book to pick up, but found it even harder to put down.