Tomorrow When The War Began

Books mentioned in TWTWB

All's quiet on the western front

All's quiet on the western front is a book by German WWI veteran Erich Maria Remarque. It was first published in November and December 1928, titled Im Westen nichts Neues in a German newspaper (in German) and later, in book form on the 29th of January 1929. It was then translated into 21 other languages including English and 2.5 million copies were sold in the first 18 months.

The book is classified under the genre 'war stories' and the book and it's sequel were among the books burned and completely banned in Nazi Germany. It is about a German soldier, Paul Bäumer, who joins the German army shortly after the start of World War I. His class was "scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants, and labourers." Bäumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates. There they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older soldier, nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades have to engage in frequent battles and endure the dangerous and often dirty conditions of warfare.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a novella by Anglo-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad. It was originally published as a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, then it was published as a novella in 1902. Heart of Darkness has been variously published and translated into many languages and 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness as the sixty-seventh of the hundred best novels in English of the twentieth century.

The Narrator, describes a night spent on a ship in the mouth of the Thames River in England. Charles Marlow, one of the men on board, tells of his time spent as a riverboat captain in the Belgian Congo.

With the help of his aunt, Marlow gets a job as captain on a steamship on the Congo River in Africa for a European business outfit called the Company. First he travels to the European city he describes as a "whited sepulcher" to visit the Company headquarters, and then to Africa and up the Congo to assume command of his ship. Headquarters is strangely ominous, and on his journey to Africa, he witnesses waste, incompetence, negligence, and brutality so extreme that it would be absurd if it weren't so awful. In particular, he sees a French warship firing into a forest for no obvious or sensible reason.

Why I think these books were mentioned in the novel

I think that the reason why John Marsden included these books is because they relate to the war story and one of their main themes is war and battle. Also, there are ideas and opinions that are extremely similar in these books. All's quiet on the western front is based on there being a war and Paul Bäumer goes and becomes a soldier to fight for his country. In Heart of darkness, Charles Marlow witnesses a brutal ordeal in Africa when some natives are shot at and are treated very unjustly.