At Night All Blood is Black

Trigger warning: fuckin' everything. As in, if you're the kind of person who needs trigger warnings, this is not a book for you. Even if you aren't, you may want to be in a mental safe space before reading this: it's pretty devastating.

The violence of the war is bad enough, but what really got to me was the emotional violence that the protagonist endures: unimaginable loneliness, guilt, compounded with tragic losses... and absolutely no way to communicate. He internalizes it all, to the point of inventing complete conversations and relationships with the people around him, ending up lost in a world of his own imagining. The book is narrated first person, so all we have is his perspective, and the author handles the sanity death spiral masterfully.

Edition note: the narrator's language is quite lovely, a syncopated voice that I think would be especially effective in audiobook.