WWII Based Books

[ritzbiscuits]

I fancy reading a couple of books about WWII this year, as it's a subject I'm fascinated in.

I have 'All The Light We Cannot See' on my bookshelf unread. Can you lovely bunch recommend any others?

Me, me!
Suite francaise is absolutely brilliant- (and very very sad.)

Some great fiction suggestions here. For non-fiction, I have always loved True to Both My Selves by Katrin Fitzherbert, who grew up in Nazi Germany as the gulf of a German member of the Nazi Party and a half-German, half-British woman. Absolutely fascinating account of being a child in Nazi Germany. At the end of the war, her parents divorced and she came to the UK with her mother and brother. Really interesting in terms of identity and her feelings around this.

They're children's books but I always loved The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier and I Am David by Anne Holm - the latter is more about the aftermath of the war but both involve children travelling alone across Europe to be reunited with family members.

And for non fiction you can’t go wrong with historians like Laurence Rees, Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans (might have first name wrong), Antony Beevor. There are others!

The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard cover WW2 - the first book starts in 1938, the second and third cover the war years, and the fourth covers the aftermath. The fifth goes into the 1950s. It’s a family saga but describes well what it was like to live through the war.

To read about the blitz try www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/

another book which is interesting ( not about the blitz) is Murder on the Home Front, by Molly Lefebure. Think it might have been a tv series as well?

The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, brilliant!

I love The Avenue books by RF Delderfield. Cover WW2 in the London suburbs.
Also recommend the Kate Atkinson books mentioned upthread.

Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy
(And shamelessly placemarking to add some books to my list!)

I’m reading Coming Home by Rosemary Pilsner at the moment and really enjoying it..

Suite Francaise is great, I also loved 'The Nightingale' by Kristin Hannah.
' Storm of Steel' by Ernst Junger is good for a different perspective as is 'Hiroshima' by John Hersey. The rise and fall of the Third Reich is interesting too.

I highly recommend Simon Garfield's We Are At War, a collection of Mass Observation diaries kept by people living through the war.

I've also been telling everyone I know about a beautifully-written and touching novel about an evacuee - Doreen by Barbara Noble (it's a Persephone book).

Belinda Alexander’s Tuscan Rose is set in WWII Italy, which makes it a bit different. I listened to it as an audio book and thought it dragged on a bit, but it’s an eventful story.

Susan Isaacs “Shining Through” is an oldie, but a goodie.

An old one which is a woman looking back on her life including the major story taking place in the war is Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. Easy to read but thought provoking with a fab central character and a great narrative.

The English Patient is also good with a lot of ideas about race and nationality and of course 'that' story.

Wow! This is going to keep me busy. Thanks all so much for your suggestions

So many books to add to my list too!

I read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr recently. I know they are meant for children but my dd was reading them. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels
Enigma Robert Harris

I've just finished reading "Do The Birds Still Sing in Hell?" By Horace Greasley. That's real life about a POW who escaped regularly and always went back.

Then there the diaries of Edith Appleton. A nurse in the First World War on the front line. I know it's not WW2 although it IS interesting. It's called "A Nurse At The Front" and is by Ruth Cowen.

I tend to be less about WW2 than WW1, don't quite know why. On my to read list is "Undertones of War" by Edmund Blunden, got that in a lovely Folio Society version.

Oh and I absolutely second what a pp said about The Silver Sword. Marvellous book.

I would recommend Motherland by William Nicholson.

I read it about 3 years ago and I still find myself thinking about it nowadays, and in fact I’m very tempted to re-read it.

Non fiction, A Life in Secrets by Sarah Helm. It's about Vera Atkins trying to trace what happened to all the female SOE agents who disappeared. Heartbreaking but beautifully written, extremely well researched and there's even a twist!

Fiction, A Town Like Alice, Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Avoid The Tatooist of Auschwitz.

Yes, I've seen quite a few bad reviews of Tatooist of Auschwitz so I'm looking for better!

The first book in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, Men At Arms, is brilliant. They get progressively more bitter and less funny after that.

An amazing and not very well-known novel about the rise of Nazi Germany is The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes.

Great thread, I love a lot of the books mentioned and so many new ones to try as well. Carrie's War is one of my favourite books of all time, so poignant and so well written. Also the PP who mentioned The Seige, god I couldn't stop thinking about that book for ages after I read it. Even now I sometimes still think of it - and I read it about 10 years ago!

The Pat Barker Regeneration trilogy is good OP. Also Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard and A Town Like Alice (which starts off with the war).

Second A Life in Secrets - it's amazing.

For another fiction suggestion, I'd recommend Restless by William Boyd. Espionage set between WW2 (early years) and the 1970s. Really well written.

The Night Watch is one of my favourite books. The BBC adaptation from a couple of years ago was brilliant too, with a great cast.

I also enjoyed The Welsh Girl, which tells a very different side of the war from the Blitz.

I’m currently reading Tamar by Mal Peet, technically for teenagers, about the Dutch resistance and SOR during the war.

Another by Sarah Helm is If this Is a Woman. About the women‘s concentration camp Ravensbrueck which imprisoned mostly political prisonersand resistance people.