Slaughterhouse-Five

This short novel follows Billy Pilgrim, an ordinary American soldier who becomes, as he puts it, unstuck in time, drifting between moments of his life in no fixed order. These include his time as a prisoner of war in Germany, where he witnesses the bombing of Dresden, as well as his later quiet life as an optometrist in America and an imagined captivity on a distant planet. Vonnegut draws on his own wartime experience to write about war without glory. The book is darkly funny and sad at once, and it is one of the best-known anti-war novels of the twentieth century.