An unflinching and unsentimental portrayal of war

Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves. Graves is best known for his historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, set in imperial Rome. But before that, he was best known for his writing about World War I. He was badly wounded at Loos and, alongside Wilfred Owen and his close friend Siegfried Sassoon, was a key part of the conflict’s efflorescence of anti-war poetry. This autobiography of Graves’ youth remains one of the greatest accounts of the war; unsentimental, often comic, but unflinching in its portrayal of battle and of postwar trauma. Buy Good-Bye to All That from your local bookstore.