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The Restoration Garden
by Sara Blaydes
Hired to restore the overgrown gardens of Havenworth Manor, landscape architect Julia Esdaile discovers that ninety-two-year-old Margaret Clarke is racing to fulfill a lifelong vow before she dies. In 1940, Margaret’s artist sister, Irene, fled the estate for wartime London alongside an RAF officer—only to make an unimaginable choice and vanish forever. Now, working alongside Margaret’s godson, Julia must dig through the estate's tangled past to uncover the truth behind Irene’s disappearance and the heartbreak buried beneath the soil.
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The Sea Gate
by Jane Johnson
While sorting through her late mother’s affairs, Rebecca discovers a handwritten letter from an elderly cousin, Olivia, pleading for help to save her home in Cornwall. Arriving at the coastal house, Rebecca finds Olivia hospitalized and the property in disrepair—hiding attic treasures and a secret tunnel leading straight to the sea. Determined to restore the home so Olivia can return, Rebecca begins peeling back the layers of decay, unearthing hidden truths from Olivia’s youth during the Second World War: a perilous era of forbidden romance, wartime danger, and sacrifices made to protect the people she loved.
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We Must Not Think of Ourselves
by Lauren Grodstein
In November 1940, Adam Paskow is forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, cut off from his former life and trapped under brutal Nazi rule. Recruited by a clandestine network of archivists racing to document the truth of their plight, Adam begins gathering the intimate testimonies of friends, neighbors, and students—chronicling their survival, fears, and humanity in a place where no choices are good ones. Among them is his flatmate, Sala Wiskoff, a married mother whose humor and stoicism anchor him. As confinement drags on, Adam and Sala fall deeply, impossibly in love, finding a lifeline in each other amidst the horrors. But when a rare path of escape emerges, Adam is confronted with an agonizing decision: whom to save, and what he must sacrifice to do it.
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The Safekeep
by Yael Van Der Wouden
In the quiet Dutch countryside of 1961, Isabel lives an orderly, solitary life in her late mother’s home. Her rigid routine shatters when her brother leaves his disruptive new girlfriend, Eva, on her doorstep for the summer. As household items mysteriously vanish, Isabel’s irritation spirals into obsession, paranoia, and intense desire—culminating in a revelation that proves neither Eva nor the house are what they seem, and that the shadow of World War II is far from over.
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One Good Thing
by Georgia Hunter
In 1940 Italy, lifelong friends Lili and Esti navigate the rising peril of Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws. When German forces invade, they flee across the countryside, hiding war orphans and posing as nuns in Florence to forge papers for the underground resistance. But after a raid leaves Esti critically wounded, Lili faces an agonizing mission: escort Esti’s young son, Theo, through Nazi-occupied territory to safety behind Allied lines.
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The Women in the Castle
by Jessica Shattuck
In the smoldering ruins of defeated Nazi Germany, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to her husband’s crumbling Bavarian castle, determined to fulfill a vow made to the conspirators of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler: to protect their widows and children. Crossing a shattered homeland, Marianne rescues Benita from occupying Soviet forces in Berlin and liberates Ania and her sons from a displaced persons camp. Bringing them back to the once-grand estate, she tries to forge a new family bound by shared grief. But as hidden pasts, dark compromises, and quiet complicity come to light, the women discover that survival, and forgiveness, in post-war Germany is far more complicated than the ideals that brought them together.
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Keeper of Lost Children
by Sadeqa Johnson
In the rubble of post-WWII Germany, Ethel Gathers—the wife of an American soldier yearning for a child of her own—spots a group of mixed-race children led by a nun and feels driven to uncover their story. Nearby, Ozzie Philips enlists in 1948 to break barriers for Black soldiers, only to encounter the same racism he left behind in Philadelphia, finding comfort in a romance with a struggling local woman named Jelka. Years later in 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark escapes her bitter parents by integrating a prestigious boarding school, where a chance encounter unearths a secret that shatters her past. Spanning decades and continents, their intertwined fates reveal how one woman’s vision ripples across generations, exploring identity, forbidden romance, and the transcendent nature of love.
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The Briar Club
by Kate Quinn
In 1950 Washington, D.C., the residents of Briarwood House—a shabby all-female boardinghouse—keep their heads down and their secrets guarded. That changes when Grace March, an enigmatic young widow, moves into the attic room. Through weekly dinners and sun tea, Grace draws her guarded neighbors together: poised Englishwoman Fliss, concealing deep personal wounds; Nora, caught in a dangerous liaison with a gangster; Bea, a former baseball star sidelined by peacetime; and Arlene, consumed by McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. As an unlikely sisterhood blossoms, Grace harbors a dark secret of her own. When a sudden act of violence shatters the house, the women are forced to confront the paranoia of the Red Scare era and determine who among them is harboring the greatest threat.
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The Last Woman of Warsaw
by Judy Batalion
In 1938 Warsaw, two young Jewish women from opposite worlds collide amid the darkening shadow of war. Fanny, a high-society artist questioning her upcoming wedding, and Zosia, an idealistic activist fleeing shtetl violence, share only one connection: their reverence for radical photographer Wanda Petrovsky. When Wanda mysteriously vanishes, Fanny and Zosia must bridge their profound differences to track down their missing mentor, navigating rising antisemitism and mounting peril across a fracturing city.
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The Shock of the Light
by Lori Inglis Hall
In 1942 Cambridge, twins Tessa and Theo plunge into the war effort—Theo taking to the skies with the RAF, and Tessa slipping into German-occupied France as a covert agent for the Special Operations Executive. Two years later, only Theo returns. Physically wounded, grieving lost comrades, and forced to conceal his homosexuality in a hostile society, Theo risks everything in a desperate, relentless search to find out what happened to his sister. Decades later, PhD candidate Edie arrives on his doorstep, her research on the SOE leading straight to Tessa’s missing file. Forming an unlikely alliance, the aging veteran and the young scholar piece together the shattered pieces of Tessa’s secret life, unearthing a devastating truth rooted in the final peaceful summer before the war began.
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