World War Ii Fiction

Windsor, 1940: War rages, and as bombs rain down across Britain, nowhere is safe: not even a royal palace. Secretly tasked with foiling a suspected plot, Sophie Klein is placed in the Royal Library at Windsor castle, where the princesses reside. But when she learns that Windsor is compromised, Sophie must sacrifice everything she knows to save the future queen of England. Philadelphia, Present day: Digging into her great aunt’s family tree, Lacey Turner comes across a mysterious book bearing the stamp of Windsor Castle’s royal bindery. But how did it come to be in her family’s possession?

When Billy Coke steps onto the streets of London one December evening in 1940, he has no idea he is stepping to his fate. As Hitler's bombers come close to burning the city down, Billy meets the woman who will change the course of his life: Ilse Magnusson, a musician from Norway, but also something more--a spy in training. Escaping the Blitz for three days, she and Billy drive, quarrel, conceal, reveal . . . and fall finally, fully, in love. Now they must part, each to fight the war their own way.

Vienna 1938: Austria’s leading couturier, Christina Lehmann, sits at the pinnacle of Viennese society. Her lover, the renowned painter Max Hauser, is at the height of his career. But Max harbors a secret, and it is only a matter of time before the Gestapo finds out. The situation takes a dramatic turn on Kristallnacht, when the pogrom against the Austrian Jews escalates and one of Christina’s Jewish seamstresses is brutally murdered.

As Germany goes to war, the Nazis tighten their terrifying grip. Paranoia in the capital is intensified by a rigidly enforced blackout that plunges the city into oppressive darkness every night, as the bleak winter sun sets. When a young woman is found brutally murdered, Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke is under immense pressure to solve the case, swiftly. Treated with suspicion by his superiors for his failure to join the Nazi Party, Schenke walks a perilous line—for disloyalty is a death sentence.

Five years after the highly publicized trial of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” law student Valérie Portheret began her doctoral research into the 108 children who disappeared from Vénissieux fifty years earlier, children who somehow managed to escape deportation and certain death in the German concentration camps. She soon discovers that their rescue was no unexplainable miracle.

It's 1937. Fear and suspicion stalk the Continent. A million have died in Stalin's Great Purge and the Nazi terror grips Germany. But British intelligence is still trying to work out who the enemy is. As Europe heads towards war, treason is in the air. British spymasters know there is one Soviet agent in their ranks, codenamed Agent ‘Archie', and there's a frantic search to find them. What they don't know is that he is not the only traitor.

Darwin, 1942. As Japanese bombs rain down on her hometown, newly orphaned Molly Hook looks to the skies and runs for her life. Inside a duffel bag, she carries a stone heart and a map that will lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer whom she believes cursed her family. Accompanying her are the most unlikely traveling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a Japanese fighter pilot who’s abandoned his post. Messages from the skies above guide them towards treasure, but foes are close on their trail.

1940 - Stasia always found comfort in the idyllic French countryside where she spent her childhood summers, roaming the gardens of an old chateau and finding inspiration for fairy tales full of bravery and adventure. But these days are much darker, and with Nazis storming across Europe, she soon finds herself one of the most hunted agents of the Resistance. The only safe haven she can think of is Chateau de Montissaire. But she’s about to discover that it just may be the center of her biggest mission yet.

1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.

Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While war ravages the city above her, Clara has risked everything she holds dear to turn the Bethnal Green tube station into the country’s only underground library. Down here, a secret community thrives with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café, and a theater—offering shelter, solace, and escape from the bombs that fall upon their city. Along with her glamorous best friend and assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. As the war drags on, the women's determination is tested to the limits.

Paris, 1940: Madeline tries to scream, but she can’t breathe. A German soldier is working to free her from the rubble–but if he reaches her, he will find the books hidden beneath her clothes… When the Germans seize Paris, its peaceful streets fill with terror overnight, and nowhere is safe. Desperate to help her friends, Parisian bookseller Madeline Valette turns her bookshop into a sanctuary for those in hiding, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before she’s found out.

Isa de Smit was raised in the vibrant, glittering world of her parents' small art gallery in Amsterdam, a hub of beauty, creativity, and expression, until the Nazi occupation wiped the color from her city's palette. The "degenerate" art of the Gallery de Smit is confiscated, the artists in hiding or deported, her best friend, Truus, fled to join the shadowy Dutch resistance. And masterpiece by masterpiece, the Nazis are buying and stealing her country's heritage. So when the unpaid taxes threaten her beloved but empty gallery, Isa decides to make the Nazis pay.

A month ago, James Cronley Jr. managed to capture two notorious Nazi war criminals, but not without leaving some dead bodies and outraged Austrian police in his wake. He's been lying low ever since, but that little vacation is about to end. Somebody - Odessa, the NKGB, the Hungarian Secret Police? - has broken the criminals out of jail, and he must track them down again. But there's more to it than that. Evidence has surfaced that in the war's last gasps, Heinrich Himmler had stashed away a fortune to build a secret religion, dedicated both to Himmler and to creating the Fourth Reich.

Paris, 1943. The scent of fresh baguettes hangs in the air as Coralie unbolts the door to her bakery with trembling fingers. She must get out of the city. Hiding her precious leather recipe book inside her coat, she promises never to let the secret locations of the people she worked tirelessly to save fall into German hands… Present day. Raven is unhappy about being shipped off to the other side of the country for the summer to stay with the mysterious French grandmother she barely knows.

Porta struggles to keep the heavy tank between the marching soldiers. One moment of inattention, and he will bulldoze an entire company. An enormous fireball strikes the bushes in front of the vehicle. The panzer soldiers jump head first from the tanks for cover. With frightened eyes and beating hearts they lay in the sun, waiting for death. A great wall of fire rises towards the sky. - Stalin organ, Heide mumbles terrified. Porta speeds up the engine. The tank plows through sun and water. They are near Moscow, 1941.

1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her.

Italy, 1945. "Where am I"? The young man wakes, bewildered. He sees olive trees against a bright blue sky. A soft voice soothes him. "We saw you fall from your plane. The parachute saved you". He remembers nothing of his life, or the war that has torn the world apart...but where does he belong? England, present day. Antique-shop-owner Susannah wipes away a tear as she tidies her grandmother’s belongings. Elsie’s memories are fading, and every day Susannah feels further away from her only remaining family.

After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were ordered to leave their homes. The government was afraid that because they looked like “the enemy,” they might be spies. One American, librarian Clara Breed, was heartbroken and outraged. As the San Diego Public Library’s Children’s Librarian, Miss Breed was close to many of the children who were evacuated. She went to the train station the day they left, handing out postcards and telling them to send her letters.

Seventeen-year-old Eleanor is nothing like her hero Eleanor Roosevelt. She is timid and all together uncertain that she has much to offer the world. And as World War II rages overseas, Eleanor is consumed with worry for her Jewish relatives in Europe. When a chance encounter proves her to be a one-in-a-generation math whiz—a fact she has worked hard all her life to hide—Eleanor gets recruited by the US Army and entrusted with the ultimate challenge: to fine-tune a top-secret weapon that will help America defeat its enemies in World War II and secure the world's freedom.

1943. Reclus dans son quartier général en Prusse orientale, terrorisé à l'idée que l'on attente à sa vie, Hitler a fait recruter des goûteuses. Parmi elles, Rosa. Quand les S.S. lui ordonnent de porter une cuillerée à sa bouche, Rosa s'exécute, la peur au ventre : chaque bouchée est peut-être la dernière. Mais elle doit affronter une autre guerre entre les murs de ce réfectoire : considérée comme "l'étrangère", Rosa, qui vient de Berlin, est en butte à l'hostilité de ses compagnes, dont Elfriede, personnalité aussi charismatique qu'autoritaire.