Books about the home front

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you choose to buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. While my father was in Vietnam, the war lived in my grandmother’s kitchen. It was in the radio she kept on and the letters she wrote and waited for, in how the whole rhythm of the house bent around someone who wasn’t there. That’s the home front: everyone and everything organized around a war from a distance. This list is for books about that distance. Not the soldiers, but the people, towns, and institutions left to carry a war they didn’t choose and couldn’t leave. Some are novels. The rest are history, memoir, and oral history. All of them are interested in what happens to a place when the war doesn’t happen there. The essential list Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier Frazier splits this novel between Inman, a wounded Confederate deserter walking home, and Ada, the woman waiting for him on a farm she has no idea how to run. Ada’s half is the real home front: a woman raised for parlors, forced to learn subsistence farming from a neighbor while the war strips her community of men, food, and law. Frazier shows what total war does to the civilians l...