Literary Fiction War

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England's brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha's husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won't come to anything.

Epic in scope, Marge Piercy's sweeping novel encompasses the wide range of people and places marked by the Second World War. Each of her 10 narrators has a unique and compelling story that powerfully depicts his or her personality, desires, and fears. Special attention is given to the women of the war effort, like Bernice, who rebels against her domineering father to become a fighter pilot, and Naomi, a Parisian Jew sent to live with relatives in Detroit, whose twin sister, Jacqueline - still in France - joins the resistance against Nazi rule.

In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, goes to occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action.

Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in West Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive father John Cole and his brother-in-arms Thomas McNulty, this odd little family scrapes a living on Lige Magan's farm with the help of two freed slaves, the Bougereau siblings. They try to keep the brutal outside world at bay, along with their memories of the past.

En cet automne 1942, le domaine de Montillac a bien changé. La vie est dure. Le bonheur a fait place aux deuils, l'insouciance aux privations. Au plus noir de l'Occupation, Léa Delmas va découvrir la délation, la lâcheté, la collaboration. Ses proches vont subir les tortures, d'autres trahir. Elle va choisir farouchement le camp de la liberté : la Résistance. Au mépris de tout danger, dans le Paris des faux plaisir et des vraies horreurs, elle va s'opposer à l'occupant et tenter de sauver ceux qu'elle aime.

Wingwalkers is one-part epic adventure, one-part love story, and, as is the signature for critically acclaimed author Taylor Brown, one large part American history. The novel braids the adventures of Della and Zeno Marigold, a vagabond couple that funds their journey to the West Coast in the middle of the Great Depression by performing death-defying aerial stunts from town to town, together with the life of the author (and thwarted fighter pilot) William Faulkner, whom the couple ultimately inspires during a dramatic air show—with unexpected consequences for all.

Publié en 1947 en Allemagne, vendu à plus de 100 000 exemplaires, Berlin finale est l'un des premiers best-sellers post-Seconde Guerre mondiale. Une œuvre passionnante, haletante, audacieuse, qui a su, alors que l'Europe se relevait à peine de la guerre, décrire dans toute sa complexité le rapport des Berlinois au nazisme.

A professor shows a colleague a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer - but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration.

À Prague, en 1942, deux hommes doivent en tuer un troisième. C'est l'opération "Anthropoïde" : deux parachutistes tchécoslovaques envoyés par Londres sont chargés d'assassiner Reinhard Heydrich, chef de la Gestapo, chef des services secrets nazis, planificateur de la solution finale, "le bourreau de Prague", "la bête blonde", "l'homme le plus dangereux du IIIe Reich". Heydrich était le chef d'Eichmann et le bras droit d'Himmler, mais chez les SS, on disait : "HHhH".

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo on a sunny June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in sophisticated, libertine Vienna—but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t help. And then war devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier.

Fernando, joven editor hijo de un republicano represaliado, decide huir de una España abatida por la Guerra Civil junto a sus amigos Catalina y Eulogio. Los tres son esclavos de los secretos que los acompañan y que los empujan sin remedio a vivir lejos de los suyos. Una historia absorbente que nos habla sobre la culpa, la venganza, el peso de la conciencia y los fantasmas que nos persiguen y condicionan nuestras decisiones.

Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.

In September of 1940, during the Blitz in London, Audrey Stocking is blending in with other civilians who are trying to survive the nightly bombings, but she has a secret. She’s not British; she’s German. Her fake passport and nearly perfect English allow her to blend in as she works hard to help evacuate British children into the countryside. Audrey longs to reunite with her family in Hamburg, but her double life, the bombings, and the watchful British Military Intelligence have forced her to stay put. And then there are the paralyzing nightmares.

Captain Alatriste is the story of a fictional 17th-century Spanish soldier who, after being wounded in battle during the Thirty Years' War, is forced to retire from the army. Now he lives the comparatively tame, though hardly quiet, life of a swordsman-for-hire in Madrid. Approached with an offer of work, Alatriste is told to go with another hired blade to an unfamiliar part of the city at midnight and wait.

Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi - her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant - who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation.

Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Sieglinde lives in the affluent ignorance of middle-class Berlin, her father a censor who excises prohibited words from books. Erich is an only child living near Leipzig, tending beehives, aware that he is shadowed by strange, unanswered questions. Drawn together as Germany's hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, the children find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story.

Dark dwarves...darker schemes...and rising chaos. For generations the baser clans of Thorbardin have raged against Hylar, ancestral rulers of the vast underground realm. Now, the finest Hylar army has marched away to face the Knights of Takhisis - and the dark dwarves see their opportunity. Besieged in the Life Tree that is their fortress city, the Hylar struggle to survive. Magic and madness threaten from all sides as Theiwar, Daergar, and Klar press the onslaught with bloodthirsty frenzy. The forces of Chaos join the battle against all dwarvenkind.

En el año 1961 Rebecca Hoffmann, profesora en Alemania del Este y nieta de Lady Maud, descubrirá que la policía secreta está vigilándola. Mientras, su hermano menor, Walli, sueña con huir a Occidente para convertirse en músico de rock. Por otro lado, Georges Jakes, un joven abogado que trabaja con los hermanos Kennedy, es un activista del movimiento por los derechos civiles de los negros en Estados Unidos que participará en las protestas de los estados del Sur y en la marcha sobre Washington liderada por Martin Luther King.

They came by boat from a starving land, and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains, seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe, as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

Alternating between an America still cocooned in its inability to grasp the danger at hand and a Europe being torn apart by war, The Postmistress gives us two women who find themselves unable to deliver the news, and a third woman desperately waiting for news yet afraid to hear it. Sarah Blake's The Postmistress shows how we bear the fact that war goes on around us while ordinary lives continue. Filled with stunning parallels to today, it is a remarkable novel.