Best books… Michael Ondaatje

The author of The English Patient, who was last year named the best Booker Prize-winner in the award’s 50-year history, recommends six books about war. His novel Warlight, is out in paperback (Vintage £8.99)

One of the 20th century’s great historical novels, The

Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, 1932 (Granta £9.99), follows three generations of an Austrian family caught up in military campaigns, but it is much more intimate than military, and captures three eras brilliantly.

A Month in the Country by

J.L. Carr, 1980 (Penguin Classics £7.99). Two men, emotionally damaged, return to an English town after the First World War. The central character is hired to restore a church mural, and as the plot unfolds and the ancient mural becomes visible, the men’s stories become profoundly interconnected. The Incomplete Thombu by T. Shanaathanan, 2011 (Raking Leaves £25.00). The Tamil dictionary defines a

thombu as a public register of lands, and this book records properties and lands taken from Sri Lanka’s Tamilspeaking people between 1983 and 2009. Drawings of what the occupants remember of the property – a well, a fence, a palmyra tree – accompany their devastating statements of how their property was lost.

Memorial by Alice Oswald, 2011 (Faber & Faber £10.99). Heartbreaking and unforgiving, this long poem takes the deaths of more than 200 unknown soldiers, who were barely given more than

a few lines in The Iliad, and gives them life. When we come to a “notable” death, that of Hector, we see just another victim, no different from the unremembered others. Letters of Sylvia Townsend

Warner, 1982 (Vintage £15). These letters are so full of incident, weather, humour, good and bad behaviour and remarkable people – all offstage, so you father them in as if you were reading a great 20th century novel.

The Wife of Martin Guerre

by Janet Lewis, 1941 (Swallow Press £8.99) is a complex and agonising novella that imagines the story of a teenager whose soldier husband leaves her.