Slaughterhouse-Five: a surprising poster child for peace. Back in 1968, who would have thought that a novel featuring fourth-dimensional aliens would turn out to be one of the century’s most affecting anti-war novels? Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a hard book to describe. Laced with jet-black humor and heightened self-awareness, the narrative structure jumps backwards and forwards in time as we follow the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, as he is deployed to Europe during the Second World War. Based on Vonnegut’s own experiences of the Battle of the Bulge and the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five — even while taking the occasional detour to planet Tralfamadore — manages to portray a deeply authentic human response to war. Some will be turned off by Vonnegut’s postmodern approach to storytelling, but Slaughterhouse-Five nonetheless deserves to be mentioned among the great war novels.