Reader's Digest Condensed Books--Spring 1953 Selections

Patroclus narrates his bond with Achilles against the backdrop of the Trojan War.

Five Russian families move through court, love, and the Napoleonic invasion as 1805 becomes Borodino and Moscow burns. Tolstoy’s epic is Napoleonic historical fiction on a national scale—ballrooms and battlefields, Pierre and Natasha, and the question of who makes history.

Orphaned Jane Eyre survives Gateshead and Lowood, then takes a governess post at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with the brooding Edward Rochester—and discovers the secret locked on the third floor that makes their wedding impossible. Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel is Regency gothic historical romance: a woman who will not be owned, and the most famous governess courtship in English fiction.

Stephen Wraysford’s prewar love affair in Amiens is swallowed by the Somme, the tunnels under the Western Front, and the unmaking of a generation. A later strand follows his granddaughter as she tries to recover what the Great War buried.

Wounded Confederate soldier Inman walks home across North Carolina toward Ada, who is learning to keep a mountain farm alive as the Civil War wrecks the Blue Ridge. Frazier’s National Book Award winner is Civil War historical fiction of desertion, survival, and a love story paced to the land.

On the Italian front in World War I, American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley as the Caporetto retreat unravels the army around them. Hemingway’s 1929 novel is Great War historical fiction stripped to weather, wounds, and a private peace that cannot hold.