THE WOMEN

by Kristin Hannah

In some ways, the first half of this book is like the TV series Mash without the humour, and that makes it devastating and hard to keep reading. But the novel develops into an engrossing story documenting the horror of the Vietnam war – and all wars – in a way that moved me more than anything else I’ve seen or read on the subject. Frankie, a white middle-class privileged American, naively signs up as an army nurse and does two tours in ‘Nam—returning home unacceptably different and suffering from PTSD which, at the time, no one recognised. In fact, all her attempts to get help were met by the refrain “but there were no women in Vietnam”. A prompt to understanding the importance of the women’s movement, and the anti-war movements, of the time. Hannah’s writing isn’t fancy, and at times I found the end-to-end trauma exhausting, but there are still many reasons why this book should be on all our reading lists.