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HansonSeries

This series plunges into the raw realities of war, specifically the Vietnam conflict, through the eyes of a young soldier. It chronicles his journey from naive college graduate to hardened veteran, grappling with the horrors of battle, complex relationships, and internal demons. Written in vivid, nightmarish prose, these works offer a profound and authentic look at traumatic experiences and the difficult return to civilian life.

Green Sun
Sympathy for the Devil
Night Dogs

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    Sympathy for the Devil

    • 400 pages
    • 14 hours of reading
    4.1(19)Add rating

    Kent Anderson's stunning debut novel is a modern classic, a harrowing, authentic picture of one American soldier's experience of the Vietnam War--"unlike anything else in war literature" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam--from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

    Sympathy for the Devil
  2. 2

    Night Dogs

    • 496 pages
    • 18 hours of reading
    4.0(12)Add rating

    Acclaimed crime writer Kent Anderson's "fiercely authentic and deeply disturbing" police novel, following a Vietnam veteran turned cop on the meanest streets of 1970s Portland, Oregon (Los Angeles Times). Two kinds of cops find their way to Portland's North Precinct: those who are sent there for punishment, and those who come for the action. Officer Hanson is the second kind, a veteran who survived the war in Vietnam only to decide he wanted to keep fighting at home. Hanson knows war, and in this battle for the Portland streets, he fights not for the law but for his own code of justice. Yet Hanson can't outrun his memories of another, warmer battleground. A past he thought he'd left behind, that now threatens to overshadow his future. An enemy, this time close to home, is prying into his war record. Pulling down the shields that protect the darkest moments of that fevered time. Until another piece of his past surfaces, and Hanson risks his career, his sanity--even his life--for honor.

    Night Dogs
  3. 3

    Green Sun

    4.0(16)Add rating

    Oakland, 1982: one good cop against the world. GREEN SUN is the long-awaited third novel from cult author Kent Anderson.

    Green Sun