Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets 'the treatment' that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with his commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: The Army is their heart...

It's 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it's not just a political tangle that's kept him tethered to the country. There's also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor...

In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad.

A novel about a young Muslim war orphan whose family is killed in a military operation gone wrong, and the American soldier to whom his fate, and survival, is bound.

"A 'Chocolat' soldier with the French army during World War I, Senegalese Alfa Ndiaye's friend Mademba Diop is in the same regiment. Injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind. He sees this refusal as cowardice. To avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, every night Alfa sneaks across...

On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of...

Jeremiah Prins's life of privilege as the son of a school headmaster in the Dutch East Indies comes crashing to a halt in 1942 after the Japanese Imperialist invasion of the Southeast Pacific. Caring for his younger siblings when his father and older stepbrothers are separated from the rest of the family, he is surprised by what life in the camp reveals about a woman he barely knows--his frail, troubled mother. When the darkest sides of humanity threaten...

"Lacerating and lyrical, We Come to Our Senses centers on men and women affected by combat directly and tangentially, and the peculiar legacies of war. The story "Evie M." is about a vet turned office clerk whose petty neuroses derail even her suicide. In "We Come to Our Senses," a hip young couple leaves the city for the sticks, trading film festivals for firearms; in "Colleen" a woman redeploys to her Mississippi hometown, and confronts the superior...