Books about war and family

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. My father came home from Vietnam and didn’t talk about it. That silence wasn’t emptiness. It had a shape and a weight, and the whole family lived around it without naming it. The war was always present in our house, the way things are when they’re too large to look at directly. I didn’t fully understand this until I started reading books about it, which is part of why I read them. This list is for the books that take that silence seriously. These are the books about what war does to families: what gets carried home, and what gets passed down without ever being explained. Some are memoirs. Some are novels. All of them are trying to account for something that lives in houses long after the fighting stops. The essential list In Country (1985) by Bobbie Ann Mason Sam Hughes is seventeen, growing up in Kentucky, trying to understand a father who died in Vietnam before she was born. Her uncle, a veteran, lives with the family, and the war is present in the house the way it’s present in a lot of houses: felt in everything, spoken about in nothing. Mason writes...