All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque

This international bestseller was written by a German novelist and first published in 1929. It is set during World War One and follows a group of eighteen year old German schoolboys who were marched to the recruiting office by their schoolmaster to enlist. The story is told through the eyes of one of them and we learn of his thoughts and feelings as he and his comrades experience the horrors of life at the front.

It is excellent, very powerful and moving. Remarque writes at the front of the book that it 'is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war - even those of it who survived the shelling'.

Recommended by Liz