Drafted into the US Army, Tim O’Brien served as foot soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and drawing on that experience, his storytelling blurs fiction and reality. This sequence of short stories, together as powerful as a novel, describes both the madness of the war and the burden of the experience on those who fought. First published in 1990, when the Guardian described it as ‘one of the best war books of this century’.