I need GRIPPING page- turners...

[tethersend]

Am off work with a broken shoulder, in pain and so, so bored...

Please recommend me some absorbing books!

I love books about WW2, but am up for reading anything set at any time, ever.

Please help. I need books to blow me away and take my mind off things.

Sorry about your shoulder, tethersend. Great thread, though

Thanks for best wishes

And yes Cote, it was almost worth doing it to get a great reading list

Just finished The Snow Child. Fab and beautiful, quite eerie.

Sorry about your shoulder.

You must must read The Best Of Our Spies. I really enjoyed it- it's a thriller set in WW2, very well-reviewed.

Life after life by Kate Atkinson?

'The Eye of the Needle' - Ken Follett
'Jackdaws' - Ken Follett
'Restless' - Wiiliam Boyd
'Purge' - Sofi Okanssen
'Ordinary heroes' - Scott Turow
'A Town Like Alice' - Nevil Shute

Quincunx! Quincunx! As other poster has said this is brilliant. Also maybe the shardlake books of C J Sansom. Have you read Connie Willis -Blackout? One of her books set in a time travel universe so slightly SF but set in the Blitz. 2 volumes, & impossibly brilliant! But if you've not read the quincunx, I envy you the experience of it for the first time.

the ww2 time travel books by Connie Willis are fantastic. and I say that as someone who really isn't into scifi. they are more about fitting into that time period and how people really dealt with the bombings in london. they are valled Blackout and All clear.

I also just read Five days that shocked the world by nicholas best. I think it was £1.99 on kindle. it follows swberal people's accounts of the last days of ww2 in Berlin and italy. it inxludes jitlers last days and mussolinis and also ordinary people. harrowing but I couldn't put it down.

sorry about typos on phone

Yes, I read that too- and Secrets Of Bletchley Park. Both fab, and cost buttons for kindle.

tethersend - I thought of a couple of books for you. The author is Charles Cummings. He writes modern spy books. Very very good. I recommend all his books except "The Hidden Man".

I read Pillars of the Earth last year. By Ken Follett. Substantial book, well written and also easy to read with great characters. Its fiction, set in 12thC. I wasn't sure at first but I got hooked quickly!

Any of Ruth Rendell's novels that aren't part of the Wexford series. Plus any of hers which are published in the name of Barbara Vine. Try 'A Dark-Adapted Eye'.

Andrew Taylor's Roth Trilogy (The Four Last Things, The Judgement of Strangers, The Office of the Dead)

Early Robert Goddard (the recent ones are dreadful). Try Painting The Darkness, Past Caring, In Pale Battalions.

some if not all of these will be on Kindle.

Thank you for this everyone, am actually off with a broken ankle and have read Gargoylesand am up to date with Game of Thrones and adored Wolf Hall. Have ordered Bryant and May, Apple tree Yard and Angelmaker, thank you all!

Tethersend, have you read Resistance by Owen Shears? It's set in rural Wales in WW2 - but a Ww2 where the Nazis are winning and have invaded Britain. I found it really gripping.

Another to get your teeth into (though not WW2) - The Sealed Letter by Emma Donaghue - really fascinating novel based on a true case and very enlightening about the rights of women in divorce cases in Victorian Britain. Which makes it sound dry as anything but it isn't at all.

And thank you to whoever mentioned The Quincunx, I read it ages ago as a library book and loved it but couldn't remember the name or author (which made tracking it down in Waterstones a bit tricky!) Off to buy online to reread.

Sorry to skip to the end of the thread but if you want a bit of a different slant to WW2 then I would recommend Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor for an utterly absorbing look at just exactly what the Russians did and sacrificed in order for the Allies to win.

this

its shit but quite gripping

www.amazon.co.uk/Nearest-Thing-Crazy-Elizabeth-Forbes/dp/1908122587/ref=la_B001KHH0GO_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380050887&sr=1-1

agree glass room is good
his other spy one not so good

agree apple tree yard is gripping too

reconstructing amelia is good

the other typist is ACE as is Red Joan

for non fic "millions like us" about women in ww2 is ace by virginia Nicholson

Marnie by WInston graham ( have never seen the film)

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, if you haven't already read it, it's outstanding... a zillion times better than the film.

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donaghue - really fascinating novel based on a true case and very enlightening about the rights of women in divorce cases in Victorian Britain. Which makes it sound dry as anything but it isn't at all.

YYY to this! Very interesting and gripping book.

I read Stalingrad recently. I felt like I was there. Not in a good way.

yup - the breastfeeding mum bit has stayed with me in the ?10 years since i read it.harrowing

It is harrowing but I'm glad I read it because it's a story that needs to be told, especially given that really it was the Russians that won WWII for us, although you'd never know it to look at tripe like Saving bloody Private Ryan.