Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Penelope Lively

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: 'a history of the world ... and in the process, my own'.  Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.

Moon Tiger

Hans Fallada

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

Alone in Berlin

Evelyn Waugh

Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.

Officers and Gentlemen

James Salter

Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single goal: to become an ace, one of that elite fraternity of jet pilots who have downed five MIGs. But as his fellow airmen rack up kill after kill - sometimes under dubious circumstances - Cleve&rsquo;s luck runs bad. Other pilots question his guts. Cleve comes to question himself. And then in one icy instant 40,000 feet above the Yalu River, his luck changes forever. Filled with courage and despair, eerie beauty and corrosive rivalry, James Salter&rsquo;s luminous first novel is a landmark masterpiece in the literature of war.

The Hunters

James Jones

The soldiers of C-for-Charlie Company are not cast from the heroic mold. The unit's captain is too intelligent and sensitive for the job, his first sergeant is psychotic, and the enlisted men begin the campaign gripped by cowardice. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad - and the living from the dead - when they arrive on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Based on James Jones' experience in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, The Thin Red Line is a raw and unsparing depiction of the senselessness and brutalizing impact of war.

The Thin Red Line

Norman Mailer

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead' is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare. 
 
Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amisdst the sounds and fury of battle.

The Naked and the Dead

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful - but in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour Count Luna to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to seize his land, Jessiersky can't shake the feeling that Count Luna blames him - and, after the war ends, that Count Luna will have his revenge. So begins a wild, weird and witty cat-and-mouse chase through windswept moors, shadow-filled houses and, eventually, the catacombs of Rome, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: who is Count Luna? Where is he hiding? And will he stop at nothing - not even the edges of the plausible and canny - to exact his bloody venegance?

Count Luna

John le Carré

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good. 
 
Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own story, John le Carré has given us a novel of superb and enduring quality.

A Legacy of Spies

Len Deighton

Deep in Marxist Guerilla territory a hopeless war is being fought. 
 
The Berlin Wall is demolished. Marx is dead. Try telling that to Ramon and his desperate men hiding in the jungle cradling their AK 47s, dusting off the slabs of Semtex and dreaming of world revolution. 
 
MAMista takes us to the dusty, violent capital of Spanish Guiana in South America, and thence into the depths of the rain forest. There, four people become caught up in a struggle both political and personal, a struggle corrupted by ironies and deceits, and riddled with the accidents of war. They are four people who never should have found themselves bound together in a mission for revolution, which may be the sentence of death. 
 
Never has Deighton portrayed so accurately the terror and the tedium of war, or the shifting alliances and betrayals between people who have nothing to lose but their lives.

MAMista

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943-4. 
 
At the centre of the novel are two young men: the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America's Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.

Goodbye Mickey Mouse

Heinz Rein

April 1945, the last days of the Nazi regime. While bombs are falling on Berlin, the Gestapo are still searching for traitors, resistance fighters and deserters. People mistrust each other more than ever. Everyone could be a spy. 
 
In the midst of chaos, the young soldier Joachim Lassehn desperately wants to escape. Friedrich Wiegand, a trade unionist tortured in a concentration camp, tries to speed up the end of the war through sabotage. Doctor Walter Böttcher helps refugees to survive. And Oskar Klose's pub is the conspiratorial meeting point of a small resistance group that the SS is trying to trace. Weaving together their stories, Heinz Rein offers an unforgettable portrait of life in a city devastated by war. 
 
Unsettling, raw and cinematic, Berlin Finale was published in Germany in 1947 and quickly became a bestseller. Newly translated eighty years later, it is ripe for rediscovery.

Berlin Finale

Waugh's own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy's Club - is only part of the shambles of Crouchback's war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity.

Sword of Honour

Qian Zhongshu

Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family's expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the liner back, Fang's life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties - while when he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a marriage of disastrous proportions. A glorious tale of love, marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one of the greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Western traditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a unique feast of delights.

Fortress Besieged

John Buchan

In Greenmantle (1916) Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, travels across war-torn Europe in search of a German plot and an Islamic Messiah. He is joined by three more of Buchan's heroes: Peter Pienaar, the old Boer Scout; John S. Blenkiron, the American determined to fight the Kaiser; and Sandy Arbuthnot, Greenmantle himself, modelled on Lawrence of Arabia. The intrepid four move in disguise through Germany to Constantinople and the Russian border toface their enemies: the grotesque Stumm and the evil beauty of Hilda von Einem.

Greenmantle

A collection of thirteen stories that offer an inside view of fighting men poised at the edge of death. 
 
Len Deighton's only collection of shorter fiction, this dazzling array of stories spans twenty-three centuries of warfare. 
 
From Hannibal's march on Rome - when strange, moving objects terrorise the troops of one of the toughest and most skilful armies in history - to the efforts of a belittled Civil War general to get his men to face the Confederate army; to the dawn skies above an artillery-blasted French battle-line where a dogfight unfolds, to Vietnam; where two lost American soldiers stumble across an abandoned military airfield. 
 
Each story in Declarations of War explores the effects of war upon man's character, how it pushes him to act in a dehumanized, machine-like way, often leading to extraordinary deeds, both good and ill. It portrays human conflict through a series of devastating experiences and shows how great deeds are often but the smallest thread in the large fabric of war.

Declarations of War

Kornel Filipowicz

The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes. 
 
Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelling of national events as well as uncomfortable personal encounters on the street, in the café, at the office, in his love affairs. He is intimate but reserved; conversational but careful; reflective but determined. As he becomes increasingly and chillingly alienated from other people, the reader is drawn into complicit acquiescence. We are forced to consider what it means to be heroic and how we ourselves would behave in the same circumstances. 
 
Written in 1961, this is the masterpiece of one of the great Polish writers of the 20th century.

The Memoir of an Anti-Hero

Väinö Linna

Published for the first time in a faithful English translation, Unknown Soldiers is the story of a platoon of ordinary Finnish soldiers fighting their Soviet Union counterparts during the Second World War. Drawing on Linna's own wartime experiences, this gritty and realistic account shatters the myth of the noble, obedient Finnish soldier.

Unknown Soldiers

Isaac Babel

Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish childhood, to the relatively non-Jewish world of his collection of stories entitled 'Red Cavalry'. Babel's masterpiece, 'Red Cavalry' is the most dramatic expression of his dualism and in his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his heritage heralds the great American-Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Red Cavalry and Other Stories

'I'll never understand the fucking Army.' 
 
Prew won't conform. He could have been the best boxer and the best bugler in his division, but he chooses the life of a straight soldier in Hawaii under the fierce tutelage of Sergeant Milt Warden. When he refuses to box for his company for mysterious reasons, he is given 'The Treatment', a relentless campaign of physical and mental abuse. Meanwhile, Warden wages his own campaign against authority by seducing the Captain's wife Karen - just because he can. Both men are bound to the Army, even though it may destroy them. 
 
Published here in its uncensored, original version, From Here to Eternity is a raw, electrifying account of the soldier's life in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor-of men who are trained to fight the enemy, but cannot resist fighting each other.

From Here to Eternity

Frederic Manning

Niall Ferguson

A moving, raw and powerful novel about fighting on the front - 'The finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read' (Ernest Hemingway) 
 
Bourne is a private fighting on the front. He is under pressure to accept a commission and become an officer, but he prefers to be among the ranks, drawn into the universal struggle for survival in a world gone mad. 
 
Manning's startling work is unlike any other First World War novel in its portrayal of the lives of ordinary British soldiers: the trauma of the Somme; the moments of bloodlust; the camaraderie, rivalry, alcohol and boredom. Considered obscene for its language and previously published in censored form as Her Privates We, The Middle Parts of Fortune appears here in its raw, unexpurgated version.

The Middle Parts of Fortune

Somme And Ancre, 1916

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