Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war novel follows Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant in the American army during the Second World War who is captured by the Germans and, held as a prisoner of war in a Dresden slaughterhouse, survives the Allied firebombing of the city, as Vonnegut himself did. Billy has also come unstuck in time, moving back and forth between moments of his life out of order, and believes he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Blending historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography and satire, the book grew out of what Vonnegut called a twenty-three-year struggle to write about what he witnessed. George Roy Hill adapted it for film, and some libraries and schools have banned it.

ReCactus founder Bernard Tan named it among the novels he counts himself a fan of, in an interview about how reading connects him with people.