Books Set In WW2

[LouReidPark]

What are your favourite books set in WW2?

I liked a few as a child - Carrie's War, the Judith Kerr series and I've read a couple I liked as an adult - Dear Mrs Bird, The Frequency Of Us and The Night Watch.

Looking for recommendations for more. TIA

nThe Few by Cathy McSporran

If you’ve ever watched band of brothers, Major Dick Winters also wrote his memoirs which fill in many details not included in the series called “Beyond Band of Brothers” - I’m reading it just now. It’s incredibly interesting.

Murder by Matchlight, set in wartime London, by E.C.R. Lorac, a forgotten Golden Age crime writer whose books are being republished in the British Library Crime Classics series.

Check out Kate Quinn. All set during WW2 from varying angles. I really enjoyed The Rose Code.

Oh yes I read that too!

I got a bit stuck on that theme and read Stephen Ambrose's books, David Webster's autobiography Parachute Infantry and Currahee!: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy by Donald Burgett. 😬

Nigel Balchin's The Small Back Room and Darkness Falls From the Air are both terrific wartime novels, set in London. Proper, tense, gritted-teeth stuff.

Ship of brides by jo jo moyes. It's about war brides being brought to the uk at the end of ww2. Really good.

A town like alice by nevil chute is brilliant and horrifying.

Coming home as others have said.

I have read many of the ones already mentioned and particularly loved:
the Lissa Evans trilogy,
the A J Pearce books (I think a 3rd one has just come out),
the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,
anything by Delderfield,
Captain Corellis Mandolin

But another delightful pair not mentioned so far are Henriettas War and Henrietta Sees it Through. They are a collection of letters from doctors wife Henrietta who lives on the south coast to her childhood friend and describe life at hone in a small town through the war. Very amusing. They were actually written at the time they were set as they were a regular column in a magazine

Tatiana & Alexander by Paullina Simons is set in Russia during WW2 and is one of my all time favourite books. There are several sequels to their love story which i equally enjoyed .

A slightly biased recommendation as I was the editor: The Price of Freedom - CF Fairthorne

Really enjoyed The Night Watch, Charlotte Grey and A Town Like Alice.

I really enjoyed a tv show called Housewife 49 and have always meant to find the book on which it’s based.

Hitlers canary by sandy toksvig it’s based on her dads childhood experiences in Denmark . Iv dug it out to give to my grandson , lovely book . He will be 3rd child to read , it will come back for the next !

The sequel to The Machine Gunners, Fathom Five, is excellent too - more adult themes, e.g. prostitution, so one for teens rather than young DC.

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.

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

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.

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. Fascinating

Something slightly different are the Commando Ware stories comic books

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

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.

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!)

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.

Book thief
Two brothers
Bird song

This, one of the best books ever

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

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?