The Junior Officers' Reading Club. Killing Time and Fighting Wars; Penguin, 2010

Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is a lucid, witty account of all the horror, boredom and exhilaration of war.

Patrick Hennessey is pretty much like any other member of Generation X: he spent the first half of the noughties reading books at university, going out, listening to house music and watching war films. He also, as an officer in the Grenadier guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British army has seen in decades.

Telling the story of how a modern soldier is made, from the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst to the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan, The Junior Officers' Reading Club is already being hailed as a modern classic.