World War Ii Fiction

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.

It is 1936, and Nancy Wake is an intrepid Australian expat living in Paris who has bluffed her way into a reporting job for Hearst newspaper when she meets the wealthy French industrialist Henri Fiocca. No sooner does Henri sweep Nancy off her feet and convince her to become Mrs. Fiocca than the Germans invade France and she takes yet another name: a code name. As Lucienne Carlier, Nancy smuggles people and documents across the border and earns a new nickname from the Gestapo for her remarkable ability to evade capture: The White Mouse.

Rome, 1943. With the fall of Italy's Fascist government and the Nazi regime occupying the streets of Rome, British ballerina Julia Bradbury is stranded and forced to take refuge at a hospital on Tiber Island. But when she learns of a deadly sickness sweeping through the quarantine wards--a fake disease known only as Syndrome K--she is drawn into one of the greatest cons in history. Alongside hospital staff, friars of the adjoining church, and two Allied medics, Julia risks everything to rescue Jewish Italians from the deadly clutches of the Holocaust.

Berlin Zoo, 1943: Ten-year-old Adelaide and her newborn sister are orphaned after a devastating night of bombing. Heartbroken and frightened, Adelaide runs to her mother’s closest friend, Katharina Heinroth, and the kind zookeeper takes the two little girls under her protection. As the bombing intensifies, Adelaide tries to shut out the horrors of war by caring for her tiny sister and playing with the adorable baby monkeys. But when Katharina organizes a dangerous operation to enable children and animals to escape the battle-scarred city, something goes wrong.

While Art Turner and the men of USS Bull Shark struggle in the Pacific against the Japanese and against their own inner demons, Captain Pat Jarvis and the men of USs Megalodon have a German tiger by the tail in the Caribbean… and it’s only a matter of time before he rips them to pieces.

Art Turner and the crew of USS Bull Shark are about to become the spearhead in a new offensive in the Pacific. As an island nation, the Empire of Japan depends on the sea to maintain its vital supply chain… and it’s into this jugular that Admiral Nimitz intends to plunge his knife. On the other side of the world, Pat Jarvis is given command of his brand new submarine – the Megalodon. And like her sister, this new shark is being sent on a special mission. To find and sink a rogue Nazi spy ship commanding U-boat forces in the Caribbean.

Munich, 1943. My heart breaks as I watch the smug couple carry the tiny bundle into their sinister black limousine. Carefully I write the baby’s name into my secret notebook. No matter the danger, I will do everything I can to reunite him with his mother… As the darkest shadows of the war spread, nurse Margarete Weiss is sent away to work in a mother and baby home in a beautiful corner of the German countryside.

It's 1940, and the British Expeditionary Force is caught ill prepared for the onslaught of the German Blitzkrieg and its deadly panzers. Caught in the desperate retreat to Dunkirk, Tom Harsker, son of a World War One ace, discovers that he is a natural soldier. Escaping to England and with complete disaster narrowly averted, Tom is selected to join the newly formed Commandos.

Rudi Graf is an engineer who always dreamed of sending rockets to the moon. But instead, he finds himself working alongside Wernher von Braun, launching V2 rockets at London for the Nazis from a bleak seaside town in occupied Holland. As the SS increases its scrutiny of the project, Graf, an engineer more than a soldier, has to muster all of his willpower to toe the party line. And when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a prime suspect.

The Palazzo Colombina is home to the Uccello family: three generations of men, trapped together in the dusty palace on Venice's Grand Canal. Awkward 15-year-old Nico. His distant, business-focused father. And his beloved grandfather, Paolo. Paolo is dying. But before he passes, he has secrets he's waited his whole life to share.

Twenty-five years after the end of the war, Noah Ainsworth is still preoccupied with those perilous, exhilarating years as a British SOE operative in France. A head injury sustained on his final operation has caused frustrating gaps in his memory—in particular about the agent who saved his life during that mission gone wrong, whose real name he never knew, nor whether she even survived the war.

The 164th Army Division has come to reinforce the beleaguered First Marine Division, which has been fighting the Japanese for months. It will be the Division's first combat test as well as it's bloodiest. The fighting has come to a standstill with neither side giving ground. The 164th is desperate to break the stalemate and the mounting casualties. Their possible solution comes in the form of a British Coast Watcher. Thomas Welch offers to take a small unit into the jungle to meet up with a force of natives to instigate a guerrilla war against the Japanese rear.

Berlin, 1945: Ester Pasternak walked out of the gates of Auschwitz barely alive. She survived against devastating odds, but her heartbreaking journey is only just beginning. In the camp, Ester gave birth to a tiny fair-haired infant, only for her precious baby to be snatched from her and taken to a German family. Now the war is over, Ester longs to find her little girl.

When the Nazis invade Paris, Antoinette Valette’s world shatters overnight. In an instant, she goes from being a celebrated violinist, to fearing for the life of her Jewish husband and son. With nowhere to flee, hiding in plain sight is her family’s only choice.

Although the mission school bans all that is Navajo, Ned secretly clings to his native language and culture. Proudly joining the U.S. Marines in 1943, he becomes a top-secret Navajo Code Talker. During bloody battles for Japanese islands, Ned and his brave band of code-talking brothers save thousands of lives using Navajo encryption the enemy never cracks.

In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her with a job.

In this riveting novel of royal secrets and intrigue, Karen Harper lifts the veil on one of the world’s most fascinating families and how its “secret weapon” of a matriarch maneuvered her way through one of the most dangerous chapters of the century.

Stalin exchanged more than 600 messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume - the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration - the messages are published and also analyzed within their historical context. Ranging from intimate personal greetings to weighty salvos about diplomacy and strategy, this book offers fascinating new revelations of the political machinations and human stories behind the Allied triumvirate.

In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. She has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain her Jewish neighbors. She knows all too well about German brutality - and that it's the reason she must conceal her true identity. But in befriending Sara, Elzbieta makes a discovery that propels her into a dangerous world of deception and heroism.

It is September 1940 - a year into the war - and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents to influenza as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons with Bertie. All her birds are extraordinary to Susan - loyal, intelligent, beautiful - but none more so than Duchess, who shares a special bond with Susan and an unusual curiosity about the human world.