Fiction Women World War

1941, Lithuania. Young Pola Wawer is the daughter of a successful engineer and on the cusp of a promising ophthalmology career, when her home city of Vilnius is invaded by Nazi forces. With her husband taken by the Gestapo and her home no longer her own, Pola flees the city with her parents in pursuit of safety. Almost everywhere they turn, they are met with persecution and hate, until they finally find salvation in the most unexpected of places—among the countryside villages, home of the windmills of her father's design.

Devon, 1940: When 15-year-old Daisy is evacuated from her home in London, she knows she must look after her younger sister, Peggy. She is the only one who can reassure Peggy that life will go back to normal, reading to her from their one battered children’s book, ensuring she takes the cough medicine their mother tucked in the pocket of her gas mask bag.

It's New Year's Eve in Bombay, 1913, and Madeline Bright, new to the sweltering heat of colonial India, is yearning for all she has left behind in England. Then, at the stroke of midnight, Maddy meets Luke Devereaux, and as the year changes, so do both their lives. Bold and charismatic, Luke opens her eyes to the wonders of Bombay, while Maddy's beauty and vivacity captures his heart. Only her mother disapproves, preferring the devoted Guy Bowen as a match for her daughter.

As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. Her father plays the viola in the Philharmonic, her mother is a well-regarded opera singer, her beloved and charismatic older brother holds the neighborhood in his thrall, and most of her eccentric and wonderful extended family live nearby. Only vaguely aware of Hitler's rise or how her Jewish heritage will define her family's identity, Orly spends her days immersed in play with her best friend and upstairs neighbor, Anneliese.

Corfu, Greece, 1943. Though they don’t know it, five-year-old Matilde and three-year-old Anna have kissed their mother for the last time. The Nazis have reached their sun-scorched home, and they are being taken to a place of safety, on the northeastern tip of the rocky island. They are to be hidden, at great risk, by kindly Agata and her husband, until the terrible war is over. Matilde and Anna’s tears are soothed by Agata’s bedtime stories, but she is always alert.

In April 1943 a young woman washes ashore on a deserted beach in Cornwall, England. With shorn hair and a number stitched on her tattered chemise, Alice is the survivor of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat. She's found by the mysterious Viscount Jack Trewella, who suspects that she's a prisoner of war or a spy. But the secret Alice asks Jack to keep is one he could never have guessed, and it creates an intimate bond he never expected.

In 1917, after Arlene Favier’s home burns to the ground, taking her father with it, she must find a way to support her mother and younger brother. If she doesn’t succeed, they will all be impoverished. Job opportunities are scarce, but then a daring possibility arises: the American Women’s Hospital needs ambulance drivers to join a trailblazing, all-female team of doctors and nurses bound for war-torn France.

Occupied Italy, 1944. In the mountain regions south of Bologna, Liliana Nicoletti’s family finds escaped POW James Foley behind German lines. Committed to the anti-Fascist cause, they deliver him to a powerful band of local partisans. But when the SS launches a brutal attack against the Resistance, Liliana’s community is destroyed. Forging an unbreakable bond, James and Liliana's only hope of survival is to make it to the Allied lines. Twelve years later, fate reunites Liliana, newly widowed, and James, now a journalist for a New York magazine.

Evelyn Varley has always been ambitious and clever. As a girl, she earned a scholarship to a prestigious academy well above her parents’ means, gaining her a best friend from one of England’s wealthiest families. In 1939, with an Oxford degree in hand and war looming, Evelyn finds herself recruited into an elite MI5 counterintelligence unit. A secret society seeks an alliance with Germany and, posing as a Nazi sympathizer, Evelyn must build a case to expose their treachery. But as she is drawn deeper into duplicity, some of those close to her become embroiled in her investigation.

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.

Anne Frank’s story is definitely a tragic one; every aspect of it is steeped in the tragedy of the Holocaust. But sadness is not the only thing the account of Anne Frank’s life has to offer - it’s a powerful story about a girl who wasn’t afraid to stand up for what was right. She faced the worst that humanity has to offer, and she did not let it corrupt her. Even the evil oppression of Hitler’s Nazi regime could never crush the indomitable spirit of Anne Frank. In this audiobook, you will discover her life; this is her story.

As the weather turns bitterly cold in the dark days of November 1941, fewer pigeons are being conscripted for missions into occupied Europe and Olive fears her covert program may be dropped altogether. In fact, the new CO of the Baker Street intelligence operation at Brickendonbury Manor, Major Blighty, has expressed his doubts regarding her birds—not to mention Olive herself—and assigned her to a far more insignificant role: escort to a visiting officer of the Royal Navy Intelligence Special Branch.

1938: Magda has led a sheltered life in her small village until the day she is forced from her home by the invading Nazi army. Torn away from her family and the only place she has ever known, she is offered refuge in an alpine villa owned by brilliant Dr, Tauber and his talented, beautiful wife. But despite having friends in high places, the Jewish Taubers are living on borrowed time. When the Gestapo come to arrest them, Magda is asked to protect something more precious than the silver and jewels they leave behind. Their newborn son Samuel.

"Quelli che riecheggiano lassù, fra le cime, non sono tuoni. Il fragore delle bombe austriache scuote anche i villaggi, mille metri più giù. Restiamo soltanto noi donne, ed è a noi che il comando militare italiano chiede aiuto: alle nostre schiene, alle nostre gambe, alla nostra conoscenza di quelle vette e dei segreti per risalirle. Dobbiamo andare, altrimenti quei poveri ragazzi moriranno anche di fame. Questa guerra mi ha tolto tutto, lasciandomi solo la paura. Mi ha tolto il tempo di prendermi cura di mio padre malato, il tempo di leggere i libri che riem­piono la mia casa.

Three generations of women come together in this addictive debut full of family secrets, heart-wrenching drama, and the promise of second chances.

London, 1940. After her fiancé breaks off their engagement, Evelyn decides to do her part for the war effort by signing up for construction work on Waterloo Bridge. Grieving after her little boy dies in an air raid, Gwen is completely lost when her husband sends their younger children to the countryside for safety. Enlisting as a construction worker, she is partnered with cheerful Evelyn. The two women strike up a heartwarming friendship.

Angelina Green never knew her mother, who left her in a cardboard box by the East London docks on a freezing November night when she was a tiny baby. Saved by a local orphanage, she knows she owes her life to the kindness of others. And she’s determined to repay her debt by working as a nurse. Strong, kind and patient, Angelina is a natural on the ward. But when war breaks out in 1914 and she is sent to The Front, her courage is tested like never before....

1946, Norfolk, England: She gazes out across the beach, its beauty marred by the sharp barbed wire, hiding deadly mines beneath the sand. Back in the village, everyone is nervously awaiting the arrival of the German prisoners, who will change everything. After the death of her beloved brother on the front lines in Europe, it is hard for Fran to see these young men as anything but his killers. But prisoner Thomas, with his gentle nature and piercing blue eyes that see into Fran’s very soul, will force her to question everything she thought she knew.

In 1943, movie producer Henrik Zoltan approaches Amelie Blake under the guise of offering the Hollywood star a leading part in his upcoming film, but he has a more meaningful role in mind. Amelie’s homeland of Sweden declared neutrality in the war, but Stockholm has become the “Casablanca of the North.” When top-secret atomic research goes missing in Sweden, the Allied forces scramble to recover the files before they fall into Nazi hands.

From the author of the “fast-paced, heartbreaking, and hopeful” (Kristin Harmel, author of The Room on Rue Amélie) The Light After the War, a riveting and heartfelt story of a young woman recruited to be a spy for the resistance on the French Riviera during World War II.