100 books like Broken Nation

The Broken Years is a wonderful book about what Australian soldiers thought and felt during the war.

It originated in Bill Gammage’s PhD thesis, which was the first systematic study of the soldiers’ letters and diaries collected by the Australian War Memorial. The result is an illuminating and moving masterpiece, which proved transformational.

When he began his thesis he was in unfamiliar territory, as the concentrated use of these sources was unprecedented — in fact, military history itself was not popular. But he persevered, gradually sensing he was on to something, and indeed he was.

The Broken Years became an enduring classic. It was personally very influential for me during the 1970s when I was a dissatisfied, recently graduated lawyer considering a change to something more aligned with my interest in history. I took the plunge, left the law, and I’ve been a historian and biographer ever since.

Geoffrey Serle was an outstanding Australian historian who wrote a number of fine books, and one of the best was his award-winning biography of the most renowned AIF commander, John Monash.

Various other authors have compiled books on Monash, but none are as good as Serle’s. This is a magisterial whole-of-life volume, with plenty on Monash’s life before WWI and during the 1920s. It was a marvellous precedent for me to keep prominently in mind after I embarked on my whole-of-life, warts-and-all biography of Monash’s contemporary, Pompey Elliott.

Charles Bean’s epic volumes were pioneering, illuminating, thorough, deeply researched and far superior to equivalent official histories produced by other nations involved in the conflict.

Although Bean’s books were written long ago — between 1921 and 1942 — they are still the starting point for any credible project concerning itself with what the AIF did in battle. And he edited various volumes in the Official History series compiled by other writers as well, including a book about the home front during the war.

Bean was remarkable. His Official History, and the records and research materials underpinning it, have been crucial in so much of my work—not only my lost generation multi-biographies, and also my books on Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson, but many other research projects as well.

My choice here could have been Douglas Newton’s superb Hell-Bent about Australia’s entry into the conflict, or various other fine books by renowned historians, but I can’t go past this one by an expert on Australia in WWI.

Peter Pedersen’s PhD on Monash as a commander became a fine book; his authoritative survey of the AIF during the war entitled The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front is another work of high quality; and he has also produced several studies of notable AIF battles. But my recommendation is a different publication — his extraordinary Western Front guidebook. Stay with me while I explain why.

Anzacs on the Western Front is lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, and informed by his comprehensive detailed familiarity with what Australians did. It’s crucial for anyone visiting France and Belgium with the aim of pursuing particular engagements great or small, both to plan your… show more.

The premise of this short novel sucked me in right away. Missy Wright is shy, unhappy, poor, and a spinster. She is stifled and demeaned by her overbearing sisters and the local small-town gossips where she lives. Despite the fact that Ms. McCullough paints the portrait of a fairly unsavory heroine in the form of Missy, I still found myself rooting for her, wishing with all my might that she would (under the most improbable circumstances) find love. When I write about a heroine in my own novels, I want my readers to see past appearances and the superficial trappings of our society’s ideals. That is what this novel does—it draws you in and makes you believe the impossible is possible if only we can see beyond what is right in front of our faces—that dreams really can come true, for all shapes, sizes, styles, and substance.

I read this story in my teens and as a result, spent years wanting to join the navy. (That did wear off!) Having read it again recently, it seems a much darker story than I had remembered. But the mystery at its heart won’t let you go. Nevil Shute was a great storyteller and like many writers of his generation had many experiences to draw on. The story is quite slow-moving, but poignant—heartbreaking in fact. Gradually, he unfolds the mystery of Jessie Proctor, an Englishwoman working for a family in Australia. It begins with Jessie’s suicide and we uncover the events that have haunted this young, ex-servicewoman’s life. As Shute says, "a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over."  

This is a first-person account of life in the trenches in France and Belgium in WW1. It’s actually a difficult read in places because his writing style is quite unusual and by no means eloquent, but once you get used to it, it’s truly intriguing. He wrote the book with a pencil on exercise books after the war, probably to try and exorcise his demons. It wasn’t until his family found it and took it to a publisher that his story came to light, a very frank and occasionally morbid description of war at its very worst but an essential read.

War Brides is a work of historical fiction that explores the lives of five young women from differing backgrounds who meet in a small English village in 1939. I love World War II stories about ordinary people on the Homefront. Despite a slightly misleading title, I was drawn to the strong characters who face the horrors surrounding them with the unwavering support of one another. Bryan has done extensive research into the time period and the traumatic effect the war had on British citizens. What sets this story apart is the inspiring friendship the women develop that endures over time despite the challenges of their differences, the terror of bombing raids that cause the deaths of their neighbors and friends, and an unforgivable deception.

This brief novel in stories was a pleasant surprise. I was completely drawn into the dry, unfamiliar landscape of the Australian Blue Mountains and loved that while the narrator is a young man coming to terms with his personal history, the theme of the book is the impact that the disappearance of both his grandmother and mother have on him as a boy and as a man trying to find himself in a relationship. Pierce deftly weaves in found memoirs and retrieved memories to create a bigger picture of life: how we both develop and lose ourselves, how place affects us, and how our actions can have a major impact on others.

John Monash was a master tactician and instrumental in some of the great Allied victories in 1918 on the Western Front. He was of German/Jewish heritage which didn’t sit well with some very powerful people. Famous journalist, Keith Murdoch along with Australian WW1 historian, CEW Bean were great critics and tried to convince the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes to relieve Monash of command. Even so, Monash held sway and developed tactics that British Commanders thought unworkable, and yet, they were very successful. His approach to fighting certainly shortened the war and gained him the respect of a nation. More importantly, he developed tactics to preserve the lives of his men, something that British commanders never considered. I certainly support efforts to have him posthumously promoted to the rank of Field Marshall, so great was his contribution to Australia in WW1.