Category

C 1938 to C 1946 (World War Two Period)

The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, 1933. The night skies are burning bright with huge bonfires of banned books, torched by the German Students Union. The Nazi party is swelling in number, and the universities, the centres of learning in Germany, are no longer a safe place for Anya, a young philosophy student. Anya can only...
Book and Dagger
The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war. At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and,...
The Booklover
In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option:...
The Bridge at Andau
The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different...
Collapse

Collapse 2026

Between 1931 and 1949, a series of crises broke out that threatened collective security, world order, and the internal cohesion of states across the globe. At the heart of these crises was a world war that shook the foundations of global power, a watershed moment in the history of the twentieth...
Conversations With an Executioner
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
Crash of the Heavens
In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
The Diary Keepers
A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to...
The Director
An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But...
The Double Life of Eve Sinclair
It's 1939, and Stockholm is a sea of spies. Yet Eve Sinclair couldn't care less. Nineteen years old, beautiful, born in Montreal into privilege and educated to do little more than make a good marriage, she appears to have succeeded when she weds handsome diplomat Richard Spence and follows him to...
The Fall of the Stone City
In September 1943, Nazi troops advance on the ancient gates of Gjirokaster, Albania. The very next day, the Germans vanish without a trace. As the townsfolk wonder if they might have dreamt the events of the previous night, rumours circulate of a childhood friendship between a local dignitary and...
The Goddess of Warsaw
The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling dual timeline tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and...
The Good War
“The Good War” is a testament not only to the experience of war but to the extraordinary skill of Studs Terkel as an interviewer and oral historian. From a pipe fitter’s apprentice at Pearl Harbor to a crew member of the flight that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, his subjects are open and...
Hotel Exile
Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history,...
In the Garden of Beasts
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
The Keeper of Lost Art
As Allied bombs rain down on Torino in the autumn of 1942, Stella Costa’s mother sends her to safety with distant relatives in a Tuscan villa. There, Stella finds her family tasked with a great responsibility: hiding nearly 300 priceless masterpieces from Florence, including Botticelli’s famous...
Killing the SS
Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
The Last Fashion House in Paris
France, 1942 Once, Paulette Leblanc spent her days flirting, shopping and drawing elegant dresses in her sketch pad. Then German tanks rolled into France, and a reckless romance turned into deep betrayal. Blaming herself for her mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Paulette is sent away to begin a new...
Last Twilight in Paris
A Parisian department store, a mysterious necklace and a woman’s quest to unlock a decade-old mystery are at the center of this riveting novel of love and survival, from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff. London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she...
Last Witnesses
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a...
The Lies We Leave Behind
Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is disappointed when an accident leaves her...
The Light of Battle
On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, exhorting them to embrace the “Great Crusade” they faced. Then, in a fleeting moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed. In *The Light of Battle*,...
All the Broken Places
Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in...
Manhattan Beach
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a Booklyn gangster who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, America...
Nineteen Steps
Love blooms in the darkest days… It’s 1942, and air raid sirens continue to wail around London. Eighteen-year-old Nellie Morris counts every day lucky that she emerges from the underground shelters unharmed, her loving family still surrounding her. After a chance encounter with Ray, an...
One of Them
Anne Bishop seems like a typical Vassar sophomore—one of a popular group of privileged WASP friends. None of the girls in her circle has any idea that she’s Jewish, or that her real first name is Miriam. Pretending to be a Gentile has made life easier—as Anne, she no longer suffers the snubs, snide...
The Orphan’s Secret Library
For as long as Alice Carmichael can remember, the only thing she’s been able to count on is the written word. The war may have taken everything from her, but the stories she cherishes provide solace and escape into a world that is more hopeful than 1942 England. So when Alice finds herself at the...
Schindler
Based on a true story, Schindler's List follows Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero whose transformation unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. A businessman and opportunist at the outset, Schindler arrives in Kraków seeking profit, exploiting the cheap labor of...
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück
Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those who have learned about this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, now much better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, Lilac Girls. Particularly shocking were the...
Sisters of Belfast
Orphaned during the Second World War, Aelish and Isabel McGuire—known as the twins of Belfast—are given over to the austere care of the Sisters of Bethlehem. Though they are each all the other has, the girls are propelled in opposite directions as they grow up. Rebellious Isabel turns her back on...
Soldiers in Hiding
It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the...
The Splendid and the Vile
On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was...
Suite Francaise
Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, as Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart....
Sword Beach
Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June...
The Teacher of Auschwitz
Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts. . . Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those...
Valiant Women
Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance...
War and Remembrance
These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The multimillion-copy bestsellers that capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War -- and...
When Sleeping Women Wake
1941. Following the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, the wealthy Tang family has settled in Hong Kong, believing it to be protected under British occupation. As the First Wife of the family, Mingzhu leads a glamorous, if at times lonely, existence—mothering the son of her husband’s concubine,...
The Winds of War
Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II, as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The Winds of War and its sequel War and...

There are no books rated in this category

Collapse

Collapse November 24, 2026

Between 1931 and 1949, a series of crises broke out that threatened collective security, world order, and the internal cohesion of states across the globe. At the heart of these crises was a world war that shook the foundations of global power, a watershed moment in the history of the twentieth...
Crash of the Heavens

Crash of the Heavens November 17, 2026

In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped Europe, seeking safety in the British Mandate for Palestine. By 1942, horrifying reports began to spread about ghettos being liquidated, industrialized killing centers in Poland, and a chilling campaign to exterminate...
Conversations With an Executioner
Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official...
Hotel Exile

Hotel Exile July 7, 2026

Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history,...
When Sleeping Women Wake

When Sleeping Women Wake June 16, 2026

1941. Following the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, the wealthy Tang family has settled in Hong Kong, believing it to be protected under British occupation. As the First Wife of the family, Mingzhu leads a glamorous, if at times lonely, existence—mothering the son of her husband’s concubine,...
The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück
Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those who have learned about this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, now much better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, Lilac Girls. Particularly shocking were the...
The Double Life of Eve Sinclair
It's 1939, and Stockholm is a sea of spies. Yet Eve Sinclair couldn't care less. Nineteen years old, beautiful, born in Montreal into privilege and educated to do little more than make a good marriage, she appears to have succeeded when she weds handsome diplomat Richard Spence and follows him to...
Sword Beach

Sword Beach November 11, 2025

Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June...
Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger October 28, 2025

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war. At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and,...
One of Them

One of Them September 9, 2025

Anne Bishop seems like a typical Vassar sophomore—one of a popular group of privileged WASP friends. None of the girls in her circle has any idea that she’s Jewish, or that her real first name is Miriam. Pretending to be a Gentile has made life easier—as Anne, she no longer suffers the snubs, snide...
Killing the SS

Killing the SS September 2, 2025

Killing, Book 8
As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi...
The Orphan’s Secret Library
For as long as Alice Carmichael can remember, the only thing she’s been able to count on is the written word. The war may have taken everything from her, but the stories she cherishes provide solace and escape into a world that is more hopeful than 1942 England. So when Alice finds herself at the...
The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, 1933. The night skies are burning bright with huge bonfires of banned books, torched by the German Students Union. The Nazi party is swelling in number, and the universities, the centres of learning in Germany, are no longer a safe place for Anya, a young philosophy student. Anya can only...
The Teacher of Auschwitz

The Teacher of Auschwitz June 17, 2025

Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts. . . Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those...
The Director

The Director May 6, 2025

An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But...
The Keeper of Lost Art

The Keeper of Lost Art April 22, 2025

As Allied bombs rain down on Torino in the autumn of 1942, Stella Costa’s mother sends her to safety with distant relatives in a Tuscan villa. There, Stella finds her family tasked with a great responsibility: hiding nearly 300 priceless masterpieces from Florence, including Botticelli’s famous...
Last Twilight in Paris

Last Twilight in Paris February 4, 2025

A Parisian department store, a mysterious necklace and a woman’s quest to unlock a decade-old mystery are at the center of this riveting novel of love and survival, from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff. London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she...
The Last Fashion House in Paris
France, 1942 Once, Paulette Leblanc spent her days flirting, shopping and drawing elegant dresses in her sketch pad. Then German tanks rolled into France, and a reckless romance turned into deep betrayal. Blaming herself for her mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Paulette is sent away to begin a new...
The Lies We Leave Behind

The Lies We Leave Behind November 5, 2024

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is disappointed when an accident leaves her...
Nineteen Steps

Nineteen Steps September 17, 2024

Love blooms in the darkest days… It’s 1942, and air raid sirens continue to wail around London. Eighteen-year-old Nellie Morris counts every day lucky that she emerges from the underground shelters unharmed, her loving family still surrounding her. After a chance encounter with Ray, an...
The Booklover

The Booklover's Library September 10, 2024

In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option:...
Valiant Women

Valiant Women August 20, 2024

Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance...
The Light of Battle

The Light of Battle June 4, 2024

On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, exhorting them to embrace the “Great Crusade” they faced. Then, in a fleeting moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed. In *The Light of Battle*,...
The Goddess of Warsaw

The Goddess of Warsaw May 28, 2024

The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling dual timeline tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and...
Sisters of Belfast

Sisters of Belfast February 27, 2024

Orphaned during the Second World War, Aelish and Isabel McGuire—known as the twins of Belfast—are given over to the austere care of the Sisters of Bethlehem. Though they are each all the other has, the girls are propelled in opposite directions as they grow up. Rebellious Isabel turns her back on...
The Diary Keepers

The Diary Keepers February 6, 2024

A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to...
The Fall of the Stone City

The Fall of the Stone City February 7, 2023

In September 1943, Nazi troops advance on the ancient gates of Gjirokaster, Albania. The very next day, the Germans vanish without a trace. As the townsfolk wonder if they might have dreamt the events of the previous night, rumours circulate of a childhood friendship between a local dignitary and...
All the Broken Places

All the Broken Places November 29, 2022

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in...
The Splendid and the Vile

The Splendid and the Vile February 15, 2022

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was...
Last Witnesses

Last Witnesses July 2, 2019

Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a...
Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach June 5, 2018

Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a Booklyn gangster who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men. Years later, America...
Soldiers in Hiding

Soldiers in Hiding October 1, 2011

It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the...
In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts January 1, 2011

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
Suite Francaise

Suite Francaise April 10, 2007

Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, as Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart....
The Good War

The Good War November 1, 2004

“The Good War” is a testament not only to the experience of war but to the extraordinary skill of Studs Terkel as an interviewer and oral historian. From a pipe fitter’s apprentice at Pearl Harbor to a crew member of the flight that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, his subjects are open and...
The Winds of War

The Winds of War February 5, 2002

Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II, as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The Winds of War and its sequel War and...
War and Remembrance

War and Remembrance February 5, 2002

These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The multimillion-copy bestsellers that capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War -- and...
Schindler

Schindler's List December 1, 1993

Based on a true story, Schindler's List follows Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero whose transformation unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. A businessman and opportunist at the outset, Schindler arrives in Kraków seeking profit, exploiting the cheap labor of...
The Bridge at Andau

The Bridge at Andau September 12, 1985

The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different...