Tim O'Brien · 1990 · overland

Tim O'Brien's 1990 masterwork, a cycle of linked stories about a platoon of American foot soldiers in the Vietnam War that deliberately blurs memory and invention to reach a truth deeper than fact. From a Minnesota boyhood and a near-flight to Canada, to the deadly green country of Quang Ngai, to the long return home, it weighs everything a soldier carries, most of all the things that have no weight at all. Among the finest books written about any war.

1. 1
   Worthington

   In small-town Minnesota, a young Tim O'Brien gets his draft notice in the summer of 1968 and is torn between duty and flight.

2. 2
   Rainy River

   He drives north to the Canadian border and sits in a boat on the Rainy River, a few strokes from escape, and finds he cannot bring himself to run.

3. 3
   Quang Ngai

   Across the world to the paddies and jungles of Quang Ngai province, where Alpha Company humps an unbearable weight of gear, fear and grief, and men die one by one.

4. 4
   Worthington

   He comes home a writer, carrying the dead with him, telling their stories so that they might, for a moment, live again.