All Quiet on the Western Front

Published in 1929, this novel follows Paul Baumer, a German schoolboy who enlists with his classmates after a teacher's patriotic speeches, into the trenches of the First World War. The narrative records training, bombardments, raids, hospital wards, a brief home leave that makes civilian talk sound false, and the deaths of the friends around him. Hunger, rats, gas, and the gap between the front and home are the daily facts. It is a first-person war novel about a generation that learns soldiering and loses the language for any other kind of life.

Bound in fawn and brown cloth printed with a design based on a photograph of a bombed street at Fort Souville, 1916. 8 pages of black & white plates. Monochrome photo endpapers. Light brown slipcase.