The desert has always been fertile ground for novelists. Not only in the otherworldliness of the landscape but also for its capacity to act as an existential sounding board for characters; such vast expanses of emptiness naturally encouraging introspection and reflection.

Factor in armed hostilities to so extreme and testing an environment and you have a stage set for the highest drama, the desert itself reliably assuming its adversarial role.

From the campaigns of antiquity through to more recent conflicts, war in desert locations has provided the basis for some distinguished and popular literary offerings, and here – in no particular order – is a selection of 10 of them:

1. Ice Cold in Alex by Christopher Landon

Now indelibly associated with the image of a grim and sandblasted John Mills from the 1958 movie adaptation, Landon's source novel is a brisk and entertaining yarn in its own right, its lean narrative never flagging even when addressing the unique technical challenges of desert driving. No wonder that his story of a lone ambulance crew trying to make it across the Western Desert and back to Allied-held Alexandria seems authentic in its detail, as Landon himself was an ambulance driver with the RAMC in north Africa during the second world war.

2. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Widely held to be his finest novel, McCarthy's pitiless and virtuosic take on the American-Indian Wars of the 1840s won fame both for its hyperbolic, quasi-biblical prose and for its bludgeoning violence – though arguably its greatest achievement is in the creation of Judge Holden, a wily and erudite demi-god who gleefully fiddles and foxes his way from one slaughter to the next. Littered with scenes of carnage, the desert backdrop here is not only an inhospitable environment but a purgatorial doom, in which every living or natural thing seems to exist in a state of antipathy.

3. A Good Clean Fight by Derek Robinson

Robinson's story of RAF Hornet Squadron and its exploits in the Libyan desert in 1942 rises well above genre standards thanks to its energetic storytelling, its wealth of factual detail and the author's trademark gallows humour

"What if it really is mined, sir?"

"I suppose that will become blindingly obvious, Pocock."

While the acts of derring-do might owe a fair bit to the sprit of Boy's Own, the action is underscored by a vein of authenticity that comes from the author's own RAF service, and the novel is admirably clean of gung-ho excess.

4. Dune by Frank Herbert

While the milieu here is speculative, real-world landscapes and cultures certainly inform it, the clans warring over the Melange narcotic spice on desert planet Arrakis analogous to the western powers who colonised north Africa, while the indigenous Fremen can be likened to the Senussi tribe of the same region. Despite the many Arabic/Islamic references, however, Herbert's inspiration for the novel did not come from any African desert vista but from the Oregon Dunes, about which he wrote an (unpublished) article.

5. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Powers' anecdotally-based story of a tour of duty in Iraq and its psychological aftershock is the standout from a number of entries dealing with the Gulf wars, and won much acclaim for its articulation of the long-term effects of combat stress. Enemy engagements here take place predominantly in built-up areas rather than across open ground, but this is still very much desert country – blinding, suffocatingly hot and persistently bewildering to its occupiers.

6. The Sands of Valour by Geoffrey Wagner

Yet another novel written from the personal experience of a combatant. But while Wagner's account of tank warfare in north Africa is meticulous in its detailing of vehicles, tactics and battles, it's the unrelenting cycles of terror, relief and exhaustion experienced by the crews of armoured regiments that leave the strongest impression. Sometimes referred to as the land-bound equivalent of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, this novel has not enjoyed the same enduring popularity, though both authors are adept in portraying the wearying strain of constant alert.

7. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje's Booker-winning masterpiece is more a plaint against ownership than an enquiry into the consequences of battle. Based (very) loosely on the history of the Hungarian desert cartographer and aristocrat, László Almásy, the novel sees the badly burned patient of the title assume anonymity after a doomed attempt to steal another man's wife. "Do you understand the sadness of geography?" Ondaatje asks, his dying patient's mythic desert landscapes divided and claimed by warring powers, their wonders reduced to mere waypoints and coordinates.

8. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence

By turns fascinating, infuriating and inspiring, this self-penned tale of Lawrence's role in the Arab revolt against the Turks and the emergence of the Arab League stands as a unique insight into the mind of an enigmatic and brilliant man. Unsurpassed as a perspective on the complexities of the Middle Eastern campaign, the book can nevertheless be considered at least part-fiction thanks to its questionable historicity and its tendency towards the lyrical and its ornate 19th-century prose style evidencing Lawrence's aspiration towards high art.

9. Take These Men by Cyril Joly

Essentially a memoir written as fiction, Cyril Joly's 1956 account of desert warfare as part of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment in the second world war makes compelling reading. In terse prose, Joly spells out just how and why it was such a grim ordeal to be sealed into a steel hulk and sent out to face superior arms and equipment across acres of baking wilderness. And if his supporting characters sometimes seem class stereotypical, that social divide between the ranks is clearly how Joly saw it at the time.

10. The Four Feathers by AEW Mason

This 1902 classic is a more thoughtful and sombre rumination on duty and honour than its cinematic incarnations suggest. And while today's reader might find the novel's exploration of a guilt complex ultimately superficial, the novel's penitential hero, Harry Faversham, is still ahead of his time in bringing to light the moral and ethical quandaries of cowardice and the instinct to self preservation. The historical backdrop of the Sudanese Mahdist revolt encompasses a variety of richly-painted locales, most vivid amongst them being the slums of Cairo and Omdurman's hellish "House of Stone" prison.