World War Ii Fiction

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.

Hana’s home has gone up in flames; the little bakery at the heart of the city is no more. Smoke curls into the sky and the buildings around her burn. But Hana has already lost far more – her blue-eyed fiancé was wrenched from her arms at the start of the war and her brave father was murdered by the Nazis. She’s determined to protect her younger sisters but every day more people are being killed… Hana realises that one person alone won’t win the war and she has to accept her sisters are playing their own part in the resistance.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now, it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy. These people - a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others - could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen.

Poland, 1938. Despite threats of alienation from his Christian family, Johann, a decorated army officer, falls deeply in love with Rachel, a Jewish medical student. When they settle into their new countryside home, their marriage is happy and blissful…and short-lived. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, Johann goes missing. Without a family to rely on and antisemitic sentiments growing all over the country, Rachel and her newborn daughter Ilona are thrown into the Warsaw ghetto. Faced with reality, Rachel knows the only way to save her daughter is to smuggle her outside the ghetto.

England, 1944. On a classified Navy base situated atop the cliffs of Dover, telegraph operator Katie Kingston toils day and night intercepting and translating enemy transmissions in Morse Code, hunting for the next piece of information that will give Britain the edge in the ongoing war. But as the entire base quietly prepares for Britain’s most daring operation yet, Katie has more at stake than her fellow telegraphists. Because among the allied forces due to land on the shores of Normandy in Operation Overlord is Special Forces Lt. Ciaran McElroy, an Irishman who has stolen her heart.

Margot and her adoring husband, Jochen, are madly in love. But in Nazi Germany, being in love is the most dangerous act of all. A marriage between Margot, a German woman, and Jochen, a Jewish man, is forbidden under Hitler’s tyrannical rule. Yet when friends cross the street to avoid Margot and her own mother rejects her, she stays loyal to Jochen. When the Gestapo break into their home and steal their belongings, she remains steadfast. And when soldiers arrest Jochen, imprisoning him with countless others, Margot will stop at nothing to save him.

It is 1943, and Sweden’s neutrality in the war is under pressure. Laura Dahlgren, the bright, young right-hand of the chief negotiator to Germany, is privy to these tensions, even as she tries to keep her head down in the mounting fray. However, when Laura’s best friend from university, Britta, is discovered murdered in cold blood, Laura is determined to find the killer.

Berlin, 1941. Felix Thalberg, a printer’s apprentice, has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His beloved city is changing under Nazi rule, and at home things are no better - Felix’s father hasn’t left the house since he was forced to wear a yellow star, and his mother grows thinner every day. Then one night, Felix meets a mysterious young woman in a crowded dance hall, and his life is changed forever. Hannah is like a rush of fresh air into his gloomy, stagnant life, and Felix finds himself instantly, powerfully infatuated with her.

Celebrated singer Genevieve Dumont is both a star and a smokescreen. An unwilling darling of the Nazis, the chanteuse’s position of privilege allows her to go undetected as an ally to the resistance. When her estranged mother, Lillian de Rocheford, is captured by Nazis, Genevieve knows it won’t be long before the Gestapo succeeds in torturing information out of Lillian that will derail the upcoming allied invasion. The resistance movement is tasked with silencing her by any means necessary - including assassination.

After saving her family farm from falling into disrepair Framboise, a secretive widow, lives a quiet life splitting her time between home and the creperie where she brings her mother's recipes to life. When her nephew approaches her to exploit her family's culinary legacy, Framboise is forced to confront her dramatic childhood at the heart of the German Occupation of France.

Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper waters. Not only is the vicious leader of a Filipino insurgency using them to finance his attacks, but he has stumbled upon one of the most lethal secrets of World War II - a Japanese-developed drug, designed, but never used, to turn soldiers into superwarriors.

Peggy Serrano couldn’t wait for her best friend to come home from the war. But the Jimmy Barnett who returns is much different from the Jimmy who left, changed so drastically by his experience as a medic in Europe that he can barely function. When he attempts the unthinkable, his parents check him into the VA hospital. Peggy determines to help the Barnetts unravel what might have happened to send their son over the edge. She starts by contacting Jimmy’s war buddies, trying to identify the mysterious woman in the photo they find in Jimmy’s belongings.

With an introduction read by Max Hastings. A companion volume to his best-selling ‘Armageddon’, Max Hastings’ account of the battle for Japan is a masterful military history. Featuring the most remarkable cast of commanders the world has ever seen, the dramatic battle for Japan of 1944-45 was acted out across the vast stage of Asia: Imphal and Kohima, Leyte Gulf and Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the Soviet assault on Manchuria.

American horse trainer Adia Kensington is living her dream of working at the famous Janów Podlaski stables in Poland, where the best Arabian horses in the world are bred. But her plans to bring a priceless stallion to the US are derailed when the German army storms into her adopted country in 1939. Little does she know this is just the beginning of six long years of occupation that will threaten her beloved horses at every turn.

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.

In the foment of Weimar-era Berlin, the Oppermann brothers represent tradition and stability. One brother oversees the furniture chain founded by their grandfather, one is an eminent surgeon, and one a respected critic. They are rich, cultured, liberal, and public-spirited, proud inheritors of the German Enlightenment. They don't see Hitler as a threat. Then, to their horror, the Nazis come to power, and the Oppermanns and their children are faced with the terrible decision of whether to adapt—if they can—flee or try to fight.

After the violence of Kristallnacht (1938), European Jews, now desperate to emigrate, found the consular doors of the world closed to them. Only one port required no entry visa: Shanghai, a self-governing Western trading enclave in what was technically Chinese territory, a political anomaly that became an escape hatch—if you were lucky enough to afford a ticket on one of the great Lloyd liners sailing to the East and safety.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Imperial Japan devours the southern portion of Burma, intent on taking over mainland Asia. Unaware of the coming darkness, Kailyn Moran drifts in her role as the only daughter of a widowed missionary. As whispers of war snake through the Kachin mountains, Kai’s father is convinced God will protect the mission. He entrusts the village to her and the kind yet inexperienced new missionary, Ryan McDonough, while he makes routine visits to neighboring villages.

Heartfelt, powerfully engaging, and in the tradition of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, this is a work of storytelling bravado: a thrilling action-packed art heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history, and a poignant coming-of-age epic where a child navigates one of the most morally complex fronts of World War II and lives to tell the tale.

World War II comes to Farleigh Place, the ancestral home of Lord Westerham and his five daughters, when a soldier with a failed parachute falls to his death on the estate. After his uniform and possessions raise suspicions, MI5 operative and family friend Ben Cresswell is covertly tasked with determining if the man is a German spy. The assignment also offers Ben the chance to be near Lord Westerham's middle daughter, Pamela, whom he furtively loves. But Pamela has her own secret.