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?

I second @BikingBeatrix! I do wish Sarah Helm would hurry up and write another one, but I suspect her research takes years.

I visited Dachau after reading them both partly to see this memorial in the gas chamber.

Another vote for A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.

I also adore Pied Piper by Nevil Shute which is a wonderful fantasy - the story of an older British man on holiday in France when war breaks out. I don't want to ruin it by saying more, but I can't recommend it enough.

And I'm also reading Coming Home at the moment - suddenly felt the need to dig it out.
Munich by Robert Harris is a good read about the approach to war.

If you can face reading about the Holocaust then the books by Primo Levi, especially If This is a Man and The Truce, are well worth reading. I'm glad to see others have recommended them.

There are many good books about the SOE. Also recommended above.

My main recommendation would be The Unwomanly Face of War which tells stories which have largely been hidden. But a quick warning, the Soviet women soldiers had an extremely rough time both during and after the war.

Yes to A town like Alice and suite francaise! And men at arms.

Also the pursuit of love.

I knew there was another one - Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. He worked at SOE on the codes side. He's quite a strange character but it's an insidious book - you're reading, thinking 'God you're bonkers' but it gets under your skin. Fascinating.

The Railway Man by Eric Lomax - war in the Far East

"The Resistance" by Matthew Cobb - about the French Resistance. I was absolutely gripped by this book and sat up reading it into the small hours. There's also "Eleven Days in August" by the same author, about the fall of Paris (which is touched upon in The Resistance) but I didn't find this so easy to read - it's full of information and has very detailed references/notes but to make any progress with it I found I had to keep referring to the notes which broke up the flow of the book

In terms of the holocost: The tattoist of Auschwitz was both heartbreaking and compelling. The diary of Ann Frank also. And Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning, which is about survival and hope.