Fiction Women World War

The women of Mulberry Lane anxiously wait for news. Peggy doesn’t know if she’ll ever again see Able, the American father of her twins, while a very odd letter from estranged husband, Laurie, threatens to set the cat among the pigeons. Rose can’t stop loving Jimmy, while Tom can’t stop loving her. Will Gordon ever again be the man he once was? Can he be a proper husband to Maureen, and if he can’t, what will become of their marriage?

January 1940: After a devastating tragedy, young Australian woman Lucie and her mother Yvonne are forced to leave home and flee to France. There they seek help from the only family they have left, Lucie’s uncle, Gérard. As the Second World War engulfs Europe, the two women find themselves trapped in German-occupied Paris, sharing a cramped apartment with the authoritarian Gérard and his extremist views. Drawing upon her artistic talents, Lucie risks her own safety to engage in small acts of defiance against the occupying Nazi forces and the collaborationist French regime.

June 1910. Fighting her corner in a man’s world, Dr. Margaret Demeray works as a pathologist in a London hospital for the poor. Suppressing her worry that she’s breaching confidentiality, Margaret gives a stranger called Fox information about a dead down-and-out, in the hope he’ll use it to raise awareness of bad working conditions. But when a second man appears to die the same way, Margaret starts to wonder why the enigmatic Fox keeps turning up to ask ever more complex questions. She decides to work alone, uncertain of his motives and wary of her attraction to him.

Taking over from her father and grandfather as the head of the Survivor’s Campaign, an organization whose purpose is to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, Milia Gottstein has dedicated her life to making sure the voices of Holocaust victims will never be silenced. It is an overwhelming and heartbreaking mission that has often usurped her time and energy being a wife to busy surgeon Julius, and a mother and grandmother. But now, just as she is finally ready to pass on her work to others, an unexpected phone call suddenly explodes all she thought she knew about her present and her future.

November, 1941. She’s never even seen the ocean before, but Eva Cassidy has her reasons for making the crossing to Hawaii, and they run a lot deeper than escaping a harsh Michigan winter. Newly enlisted as an Army Corps nurse, Eva is stunned by the splendor she experiences aboard the steamship SS Lurline; even more so by Lt. Clark Spencer, a man she is drawn to but who clearly has secrets of his own. But Eva’s past - and the future she’s trying to create - means that she’s not free to follow her heart.

When three little girls—Anna, Bernie, and Elica—make a pact to be blood sisters for life, they believe nothing can come between them. Anna is from an affluent Jewish family, while Bernie and Elica are from poor Austrian families who barely make ends meet. As they get older, their social differences become all too real. With infectious Jew-hate-laden rhetoric from Nazi Germany spreading into Austria, it is only a matter of time before their bond of friendship gets severely tested.

November, 1939. The British government has assembled a small group of intellectuals at an estate north of London as part of a top-secret codebreaking effort. Everything about it is clandestine. The facility is ringed with a veil of silence until one of the young female linguists is murdered. Britain's counterintelligence spymaster tasks Olivia Redmond with finding the killer and the motive. Olivia is sent in alone, without clues or suspects. Did the murder victim uncover a mole? Could Britain's program to break German enigma cyphers be compromised?

Vibrant and scrappy Maggie McCleod tried not to get fired from her wartime orchestra, but her sharp tongue landed her in trouble, so an overseas adventure with the USO’s camp show promises a chance at a fresh start. Wealthy and elegant Catherine Duquette signs with the USO to leave behind her restrictive life of privilege and to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of the handsome pilot whose letters mysteriously stopped arriving. The two women are joined by an eclectic group of performers.

Belgium, 1942. Young schoolteacher Andrée Geulen secretly defies the Nazis in Belgium, who are forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. Andrée is not Jewish, but she feels a maternal connection to her students, who are living in constant fear, and decides to take action. No child should have to suffer under such persecution. But what can one woman do against an entire army? Ida Sterno is a Jewish woman who works with the Committee for the Defense of Jews in Belgium, a clandestine resistance group tasked with hiding children from the Gestapo. She wants to recruit Andrée.

Constance Sparks always says yes…when her capricious best friend needs money; when her boss gives her more responsibility without a raise; and when her boyfriend, Hayden, who is very kind but also secretive, asks her to marry him. While planning their wedding—and struggling with anxiety about the right course for her future—Constance researches the history of her antique engagement ring and unearths the name of a man who might be connected to it, plus his tragic love story.

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons. In this make-believe world, Róza can shield Shira from the horrors that surround them. But the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Róza must make an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart.

Acclaimed author Elise Hooper explores the gripping, real-life history of female athletes, members of the first integrated women’s Olympic team, and their journeys to the 1936 summer games in Berlin, Nazi Germany. In the 1928 Olympics, Chicago’s Betty Robinson competes as a member of the first-ever women’s delegation in track and field. Destined for further glory, she returns home feted as America’s golden girl until a nearly fatal airplane crash threatens to end everything.

At her assisted living center in Wedding Tree, Louisiana, 93-year-old Amelie O'Connor is in the habit of leaving her door open for friends. One day she receives an unexpected visitor - Kat Thompson, the ex-fiancée of her late husband, Jack. Kat and Jack were high school sweethearts who planned to marry when Jack returned from France after World War II. But in a cruel twist of fate, their plans were irrevocably derailed when a desperate French girl overheard an American officer's confession in a Parisian church...

1921. Survivors of the Great War are desperately trying to piece together the fragments of their broken lives. While many have been reunited with their loved ones, Edie’s husband Francis has not come home. Francis is presumed to have been killed in action, but Edie believes he might still be alive. Harry, Francis’s brother, was there the day Francis was wounded. He was certain it was a fatal wound, but Harry begins questioning his memory of what happened. Hired by grieving families, Harry returns to the Western Front to photograph gravesites. He searches for evidence of Francis.

In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon, Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaefferová, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hevíz in Hungary. Here, she meets the journalist and writer Miklós Count Andorján. In time, they will marry, and Natalia will devote herself to life on a rural estate in Hungary.

It's the spring of 1917, and change is in the air. American women have done something remarkable: They've banded together to create military-style training camps for women who want to serve. These so-called National Service Schools prove irresistible to the Kopp sisters, who leave their farm in New Jersey to join up.

When Jess bumps into Milan unexpectedly, sparks are reignited, and she wonders if she made a mistake finishing with him in Amberton. But matters are complicated when a film company arrives at Bentley Priory to make a morale-boosting film about the RAF. The lead actor is none other than Leonard Steele, a man from Jess’ past who could ruin everything she has worked so hard to build.

Belfast, October 1940. Twenty-year-old zookeeper Hettie Quin arrives at the city docks in time to meet her new charge: an orphaned three-year-old Indian elephant named Violet. As Violet adjusts to her new solitary life in captivity and Hettie mourns the recent loss of her sister and the abandonment of her father, new storm clouds gather. A world war rages, threatening a city already reeling from escalating tensions between British Loyalists and those fighting for a free and unified Ireland.

Europe, 1939. Hanne is an adolescent boy, born into a wealthy family from Belgrade. Realizing the Nazi threat is advancing toward the Balkans with giant strides, his parents are prepared to do anything to save their son’s life. The road to survival, however, is not easy. Just as Europe’s gates are about to shut down, Hanne and 1,100 other youths sail away on the Danube River. On board the ship, under appalling living conditions, Hanne falls in love with Inge, a young German Jewish girl.

When the Nazis march onto the cobbled streets of Colmar on November 1st 1940, Josef, a Jewish violin maker, gathers his wife and daughters closely to him and tells them everything will be alright. But one year later, three sharp knocks on the door at midnight turn his 17-year-old daughter Sarah’s world upside down. As the oldest child, Sarah must be the first to leave her family, to make her escape in a perilous journey across France via Paris to Poitiers. In the mountains she finds herself in terrible danger and meets Ralf, a German deserter, who risks his own life to save her.