Books Set In WW2

Who is the author please?

Forgot to say, the Author is Jean Fullerton

The Ration Book series! Starts off with 'A Ration Book Childhood' (it's actually nothing to do with Ration Books!) I love the series, it's just ended after I think, 7 books! Loved it.

Just remembered! Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Beautiful book set in wartime Greece. Don't bother with the terrible film.

The Cruel Sea is WW2. The Ship, by CS Forrester is very similar, and also excellent. HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour is an unfinished novel, by the author who wrote The Cruel Sea, that was published posthumously. Which adds a certain poignancy - he wrote about so many people who died before they could finish their work. I would group these books together with HMS Ulysses and Das Boot. Not so much for the naval theme, as for their atmosphere and humanity.

Catch 22 is weird. Good, but a bit of a Marmite book.

King Rat, by James Clavell, is another excellent novel.

If you want something daft, try 'Allo 'Allo! The Complete War Diaries of René Artois.

HMS Ulysses by Alistair McClean. It's set in The Arctic convoys and makes you realise what some of the Navy went through. You can almost feel the bitter cold.

In addition to some of those already mentioned, The Bird in the Bamboo Cage - Hazel Gaynor (Girl Guides link too, set in China in 1941)

A Woman in Berlin is an important read rather than a favourite.

Also I liked Biggles as pp
Enigma by Robert Harris too.

I second The Machine Gunners, Silver Sword, A Town like Alice and Pastoral, Das Boot, the Cruel Sea (maybe that was WW1)
Also Empire of the Sun, V2 by Robert Harris and Munich (just before WW2).

Love and War in the Appenines, Eric Newby's memoir, hiding in the mountains having escaped a POW camp. In the course of which, he met his wife.

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Probably the best novels to come out of WW2.

Set in Burma, The Jacaranda Tree and The Purple Plain by HE Bates. I also like The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell, in the lead up to and aftermath of the fall of Singapore.

So I wouldn't say they're my favourite ww2 books ever but among the most important to read..

The saddest & most shocking war book I've ever read is 'Child of the Forest' by Charlene Schiff... it's the true story of her life as an older Jewish child during the Holocaust by bullets in Poland and it's heartbreaking.
I did cry all the way through & only finished it because I wanted to see how the author made it to a better life.

Another shocking book is 'Clara's War' by Clara Kramer... again an autobiography about the Holocaust in Poland.

What is shocking about these books is that the victims aren't in a death camp like Auschwitz.. they become victims in their own towns & villages; & the perpetrators include locals as well as the Nazi soldiers.

I think these books are necessary to read as they leave you questioning how and why people behaved as they did... and asking yourself that question; how would I behave in their shoes?

I liked Suite Francaise but didn’t love it. No idea why as this would usually be exactly my kind of book.

This, one of the best books ever

Book thief
Two brothers
Bird song

Please read the Lissa Evans trilogy which starts with Crooked Heart. They are the most wonderful books set in this era. The characters are SO engaging and the historical accuracy is so well researched that I almost mourned their passing when I completed reading them! Absolutely engrossing reads.

I love Gone To Soldiers. A Panoramic view of WW2. I think it may be out if print though, sadly. Also a recent novel I can’remember the title of. It’s something about a cookbook/recipes and features a young woman in SOE (if that’s the correct acronym!)

Plus I always like a good escape story, Colditz and so on. I have a collection of increasingly fragile old Pan editions. They're not all well-written (just because you were a POW doesn't mean you wouldn't have benefitted from better editing, or even a ghostwriter,) and some are very definitely of their time, but they can be good fun.

@EBearhug I also loved the Colditz novels and the 1970s TV series based on them. But for a fascinating and fuller picture of what life in Colditz was really like can I recommend the non-fiction book "Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle" by Ben Macintyre. DH got me it for Christmas and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Something slightly different are the Commando Ware stories comic books

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_(comics)

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. Fascinating

Nella Last’s War: A Mother’s Diary,
Nella Last’s Peace: the Post-War Diaries of Housewife, 49,
Nella Last in the 1950s.

They are very readable and the detail of day-to-day ordinary life is fascinating. Nella is a likeable character although some of her attitudes, while probably widespread at the time, are shocking to a modern reader.

There is a large chunk of the war diary missing. Not because Nella didn’t write it but because, somehow Mass Observation lost it. I still hope it will turn up, having been filed in the wrong place.

Tamar by Mal Peet
Gone To Soldiers by Marge Piercy is one of the best books I've ever read. I re-read it every few years

If you want non-fiction, then We Were Young and At War edited by Sarah Palmer & Svetlana Palmer is amazing - extracts from diaries from teens in WW2 from a variety of countries. It made me cry, though.

Simon Garfield is another who has done compilations of Mass Obs diaries. Julie Summers has written various books about life in wartime Britain - on evacuated children's parents coming home, on requisitioned houses, and the WI.

I'm currently reading the Hurricane Girls by Jo Wheeler, about the ATA.

Plus I always like a good escape story, Colditz and so on. I have a collection of increasingly fragile old Pan editions. They're not all well-written (just because you were a POW doesn't mean you wouldn't have benefitted from better editing, or even a ghostwriter,) and some are very definitely of their time, but they can be good fun.

Also, I reread all of Biggles over lockdown, and there's a stretch of those in the middle which are WW2, like Spitfire Parade. The Worralls books (about a woman in the WAAF) may be better, though - they were written by WE Johns at the request of the War Office, to encourage girls to consider the WAAF. His Gimlet series were similarly written to encourage boys. The first three Worralls books have been republished about a decade ago.