Slaughterhouse Five

Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time—he keeps re-living his experiences in the Second World War, as well as jumping ahead in time to where he is kept by aliens in a zoo. Vonnegut, a prisoner of war held in Dresden, lived through the awful Allied firebombing, and this incident forms the core of Billy Pilgrim’s character. Funny, tragic and often irreverent, the book explores fate and fatalism as well as post-traumatic stress and the appalling impact of war on people and societies.