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World War II Historical Fiction |
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If you'd like personalized book recommendations, check out our Tailored Titles services for both fiction and nonfiction books. |
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The Wind Knows My Name
by Isabel Allende
Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht--the night his family loses everything. As her child's safety becomes ever harder to guarantee, Samuel's mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin. Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita DÃaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination. Meanwhile, Selena Durán, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita's mother. Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers--and never stop dreaming.
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The Vanishing Sky
by L. Annette Binder
A mother in a rural 1945 German community protects her traumatized soldier son from her husband’s escalating nationalism, while her younger son flees the Hitler Youth to embark on a perilous journey home. A first novel.
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Dr. B.
by Daniel Birnbaum
A German Jewish journalist escapes to Sweden with his family at the start of Word War II and begins working for a publisher that evades German censorship and ultimately works with British intelligence agents producing anti-Nazi propaganda.
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White Chrysanthemum
by Mary Lynn Bracht
Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. There she is forced to become a comfort woman in a Japanese military brothel. But haenyeo are women of power and strength. She will find her way home.
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The Race for Paris
by Meg Waite Clayton
Determined to be the first photographer to capture images of Paris' liberation from the Nazis, Liv defies orders and teams up with a fellow woman reporter and a British photojournalist to race to Paris ahead of Allied forces.
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The Daughter's Tale
by Armando Lucas Correa
A tale of love and redemption based on the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre follows an octogenarian's receipt of a cache of letters, written by her mother during World War II, that uncover decades of secrets.
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The Queen's Secret
by Karen Harper
Endearing herself to the British people with her kindness and strength, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the wife of George VI and mother of a future Elizabeth II, orchestrates Edward VIII's exile while hiding damaging secrets.
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The Animals at Lockwood Manor
by Jane Healey
Safeguarding a natural history museum collection that has been relocated to a country manor during World War II, Hetty finds herself stalked by an unknown thief who tests the limits of her sanity.
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Clark and Division
by Naomi Hirahara
Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family's reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train. Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose's death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.
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Angels of the Pacific
by Elise Hooper
Inspired by the extraordinary true stories of World War II's American Army nurses famously known as the Angels of Bataan and the unsung contributions of Filipinas of the resistance, this novel transports us to a remarkable era of hope, bravery, perseverance, and ultimately--victory.
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One Good Thing
by Georgia Hunter
1940, Italy. Lili and Esti have been best friends since they first met at university. When Esti's son Theo is born, they become as close as sisters. While a war seethes across borders, life somehow goes on--until Germany invades Italy, and the friends suddenly find themselves in occupied territory Esti, older and fiercely self-assured, convinces Lili to join the resistance efforts. But when disaster strikes, a critically wounded Esti asks Lili to take a much bigger step: To go on the run with Theo. Protect him while Esti can't. Terrified to travel on her own, Lili sets out with Theo on a harrowing journey south toward Allied territory, braving Nazi-occupied villages and bombed-out cities, doing everything she can to keep the boy safe. A remarkable tale of friendship, romance, motherhood, and survival, One Good Thing reminds us what is worth fighting for--and that love, even amidst a world in ruins, can triumph.
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The Fervor
by Alma Katsu
In 1944, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, held in an internment camp in the Midwest, discover a mysterious disease spreading among the interned is linked to a demon from the stories of Meiko's childhood, hellbent on infiltrating their already strange world.
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Fifty Words for Rain
by Asha Lemmie
Kyoto, Japan, 1948. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Such is eight-year-old Noriko Nori Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin. The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond--a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it--a battle that just might cost her everything.
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The Wartime Sisters
by Lynda Cohen Loigman
Reunited after an estrangement at the beginning of World War II, two Brooklyn sisters, one an officer's wife, the other a widow and factory laborer, are shattered by the revelations of a mysterious figure from the past.
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The Kew Gardens Girls at War
by Posy Lovell
Inspired by real events, a touching novel about a new class of courageous women who worked at London's historic Kew Gardens during World War II.
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The Song of the Jade Lily
by Kirsty Manning
1939: Two young girls meet in Shanghai, also known as the Paris of the East. Beautiful local Li and Jewish refugee Romy form a fierce friendship, but the deepening shadows of World War II fall over the women as they slip between the city's glamorous French Concession district and the teeming streets of the Shanghai Ghetto. Yet soon the realities of war prove to be too much for these close friends as they are torn apart.2016: Fleeing London with a broken heart, Alexandra returns to Australia to be with her grandparents, Romy and Wilhelm. Her grandfather is dying, and over the coming weeks Romy and Wilhelm begin to reveal the family mysteries they have kept secret for more than half a century. As fragments of her mother's history finally become clear, Alexandra struggles with what she learns while more is also revealed about her grandmother's own past in Shanghai. After Wilhelm dies, Alexandra flies to Shanghai, determined to trace her grandparents' past. Peeling back the layers of their hidden lives, she is forced to question what she knows about her family--and herself.
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The Librarian Spy
by Madeline Martin
Posing as a librarian in Lisbon while working undercover as a spy gathering intelligence during WWII, Ava, as the battle in Europe rages, connects with a woman who runs a printing press in occupied France through coded messages that bring hope in the face of war.
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The Ways We Hide
by Kristina McMorris
Fenna Vos, who uses her honed ability to control her surroundings and elude entrapments to suppress the trauma and tragedy of her youth, is called upon by British Intelligence to create escape tools to thwart the Germans--a mission forcing her to confront her past in a treacherous world.
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How to Find Your Way in the Dark
by Derek B. Miller
A coming-of-age story set during the rising tide of World War II, How to Find Your Way in the Dark follows Sheldon Horowitz from his humble start in a cabin in rural Massachusetts, through the trauma of his father's murder and the murky experience of assimilation in Hartford, Connecticut, to the birth of stand-up comedy in the Catskills--all while he and his friends are beset by anti-Semitic neighbors, employers, and criminals.
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When the Emperor Was Divine
by Julie Otsuka
Four months after Pearl Harbor, signs begin appearing up and down the West Coast instructing all persons of Japanese ancestry to report to 'assembly centers'. For one family - reclassified, virtually overnight, as unwelcome enemies - it is the beginning of a nightmare of oppression and alienation that will alter their lives forever. There is the mother, reeling from the order to 'evacuate', and the daughter, travelling on the long train journey away from freedom. There is the son, who struggles to adapt to their new life in the dust of the Utah desert, and the father, who, after four bitter years in captivity, returns to his family a stranger. Based on a true story, Julie Otsuka's powerful, deeply humane first novel tells of a forgotten generation who found themselves imprisoned in their own country, and evokes an unjustly overlooked episode in America's wartime history.
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The Whalebone Theatre
by Joanna Quinn
One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household--her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist--build a theatre from the beast's skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life. As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France--a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.
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Our Darkest Night
by Jennifer Robson
Hiding from the Nazis in the guise of a Christian farmer's wife, a Jewish woman is met with suspicion by a Nazi official who harbors a vendetta against the former seminary student posing as her husband.
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The Yellow Bird Sings
by Jennifer Rosner
Poland, 1941. After the Jews in their town are rounded up, Roza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, spend day and night hidden in a farmer's barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother's stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head.
Roza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Roza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep her daughter close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go.
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The Kitchen Front
by Jennifer Ryan
An indebted young widow, a freedom-seeking kitchen maid, the wife of a wealthy but unkind man and a trained chef navigating sexism compete for a once-in-a-lifetime spot hosting a BBC cooking program during World War II.
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Eternal
by Lisa Scottoline
An aspiring writer, an athlete from a professional cyclist family and a mathematics prodigy find their bond tested by a love triangle and the spread of anti-Semitism and fascism in 1937 Italy. By the Edgar Award-winning author of Someone Knows.
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Shanghai Girls
by Lisa See
Pearl and May are sisters, living carefree lives in Shanghai, the Paris of Asia. But when Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, they set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America.t
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The Kitchen God's Wife
by Amy Tan
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. From the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.
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The Night Watch
by Sarah Waters
I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.
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