Graham Greene. The Quiet American. 1955.

The plot is great. The structure is elegant, effective, and confounding, zig-zagging between past and present so as to deploy surprises. The language is unremarkable, functional, transparent, but there is a scene of war as quietly disturbing as any I can recall (oddly enough, the most unsettling phrase in this passage is "Irish Stew"). The characters and their relations are complex, compelling, intriguing, and hard to come to easy conclusions about. But the history is my favorite facet of this: Vietnam in 1955 during the French occupation. But this is not a history book, and with its minimal background exposition I remained a bit confused about the interests and alliances involved. It's a great, brutal little novel.