In 1935, the Nazis established a program called The Lebensborn. Their agenda was to genetically engineer perfect Aryan children. These children were to be the new master race, once Hitler had cleared all undesirable elements out of Europe. Within a year, the first institution was built.
The year is 1943. The forests of Munich are crawling with danger under the rule of The Third Reich. To save the life of her unborn child, Petra Jorgenson must escape from the Lebensborn Institute. Alone, seven months pregnant, and penniless, she avoids the watchful eyes of the armed guards in the overhead tower, waiting until the dead of night. Then, Petra climbs under the flesh-shredding barbed wire that surrounds the institute and, at the risk of being captured and murdered, she runs headlong into the terrifying desolate woods.
Even during one of the darkest periods in the history of mankind, when horrific acts of cruelty became commonplace and Germany seemed to have gone crazy following the direction of a madman, unexpected heroes came to light. And although there were those who would try to destroy it, true love would prevail. Here, in this lost land ruled by human monsters, Petra will learn that even when one faces what appears to be the end of the world, if one looks hard enough, one will find that there is always A Flicker Of Light.
Set against the backdrop of World War II, Code Name Verity is a compelling tale of friendship, bravery, and sacrifice. After a British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France, the story unfolds through the eyes of a survivor who is caught by the Gestapo. Facing the threat of execution, she must decide whether to reveal her mission or protect her secrets at all costs.
Through her confession, we learn about her intense bond with the pilot Maddie, and the events that led to their fateful flight. Elizabeth Wein delivers a story that explores the depths of human courage and the unbreakable spirit of two young women determined to survive in a world at war.
Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.
No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.
The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.
This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.
The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war-from Germany's early successes to her eventual defeat-is must reading.
There on her forearm, next to a small brown birthmark, were six tattooed numbers. 'Do you remember me now?' he asked, trembling. She looked at him again, as if giving weight and bone to a ghost. 'Lenka, it's me,' he said. 'Josef. Your husband.'
During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, falls in love with Josef. They marry - but soon, like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war.
In America, Josef becomes a successful obstetrician and raises a family, though he never forgets the wife he thinks died in the camps. But in the Nazi ghetto of Terezín - and later in Auschwitz - Lenka has survived, relying on her skills as an artist and the memories of a husband she believes she will never see again.
Now, decades later, an unexpected encounter in New York brings Lenka and Josef back together. From the comfort of life in Prague before the occupation to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the endurance of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and our capacity to remember.
Based on a true story: A Spanish sea captain rescues four German castaways during a treacherous storm in 1940. He doesn’t know who they are or where they came from, but one of them gives him a mysterious gold-and-diamond emblem before disembarking. Decades later, the captain’s son receives a substantial offer for it and is told an astounding story behind the object: it holds the key to Paul Reiner’s lifelong quest.
Munich, 1919. After his family falls into disgrace, fifteen-year-old Paul dreams of the heroic father he never knew. But one night, seconds before committing suicide, Paul’s cousin reveals a terrible secret about his father’s death. This discovery turns Paul’s world upside down and leads him on a hunt in Nazi Germany to uncover the mystery surrounding his father’s death.
The Traitor’s Emblem is an epic novel spanning decades of family betrayal, impossible love, and the high price of vengeance. Set against the menacing streets of Depression-era Munich and the cruel rise of Nazism, Gómez-Jurado’s spellbinding thriller proves again that he is a master of narration.
Crime writer Erica Falck is shocked to discover a Nazi medal among her late mother’s possessions. Haunted by a childhood of neglect, she resolves to dig deep into her family’s past and finally uncover the reasons why.
Her enquiries lead her to the home of a retired history teacher. He was among her mother’s circle of friends during the Second World War, but her questions are met with bizarre and evasive answers. Two days later, he meets a violent death.
Detective Patrik Hedström, Erica’s husband, is on paternity leave but soon becomes embroiled in the murder investigation. Who would kill so ruthlessly to bury secrets so old?
Reluctantly, Erica must read her mother’s wartime diaries. But within the pages is a painful revelation about Erica’s past. Could what little knowledge she has be enough to endanger her husband and newborn baby?
The dark past is coming to light, and no one will escape the truth of how they came to be...
Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups.
The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life. In this breathtakingly wide-ranging journalistic work, West richly chronicles her travels throughout Yugoslavia in the 1930s, introducing vivid characters and illuminating details.
More than a travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon connects the people and places West encounters to the long history of conflict that has formed national identities in the Balkans across a millennium of shifting alliances. West writes, “I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works.”
As profound, sad, and funny as when it was first published in 1941, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon interrogates the forces that continue to shape our modern world.
All Clear continues the thrilling adventure from Blackout, where award-winning author Connie Willis returns us to the time-traveling future of 2060. In this gripping narrative, three Oxford historians - Michael Davies, Merope Ward, and Polly Churchill - are unexpectedly trapped in World War II England.
Michael is intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk, Merope is studying children evacuated from London, and Polly is posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. However, small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that one or all of them have somehow affected the past, potentially changing the outcome of the war.
The belief that the past can be observed but never altered has always been a core tenet of time-travel theory, yet now it seems that this theory is horribly, tragically wrong. Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians’ supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and seventeen-year-old Colin Templer are engaged in a frantic struggle of their own.
This novel is more than just a culmination of the adventure that began with Blackout. It’s a clear-eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by history.
Epic prelude to the classic spy trilogy, GAME, SET and MATCH, that follows the fortunes of a German dynasty during two world wars. Winter takes us into a large and complex family drama, into the lives of two German brothers - both born close upon the turn of the century, both so caught up in the currents of history that their story is one with the story of their country, from the Kaiser's heyday through Hitler's rise and fall.
A novel that rings powerfully true, a rich and remarkable portrait of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. In his portrait of a Berlin family during the turbulent years of the first half of the century, Len Deighton has created a compelling study of the rise of Nazi Germany.
With its meticulous research, rich detail and brilliantly drawn cast of characters, Winter is a superbly realized achievement.
Set during the dark days of World War II, Agatha Christie’s N or M? puts two most unlikely espionage agents, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, on the trail of a pair of Nazi spies who have murdered Britain’s top agent.
World War II is raging, and while the RAF struggles to keep the Luftwaffe at bay, Britain faces a sinister threat from “the enemy within”—Nazis posing as ordinary citizens. With pressure mounting, the intelligence service appoints two improbable spies, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Their mission: to seek out a man and a woman from among the colorful guests at Sans Souci, a seaside hotel.
But this assignment is far from an easy stroll along the promenade—N and M have just murdered Britain’s finest agent and no one can be trusted.
The Postmistress is a captivating tale set in the year 1940, a time when France has fallen, bombs are raining down on London, and President Roosevelt vows that American boys will not fight in "foreign wars." Yet, Frankie Bard, the first woman to report from the Blitz in London, is determined to bring the war home to America through her compelling radio dispatches.
In the small coastal town of Franklin, Massachusetts, Iris James, the town's postmistress, listens to Frankie's broadcasts. Iris, who believes her job is to deliver and keep people's secrets, does the unthinkable when she slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and decides not to deliver it.
The story beautifully intertwines the lives of three women: Frankie, who broadcasts from overseas; Iris, who holds the secrets of her town; and Emma Fitch, the doctor's wife, who waits for news from her husband who has gone to London to help with the war effort.
The Postmistress delivers a profound narrative of two worlds—one shattered by violence, the other willfully naïve—and explores how stories are told and the weight of the truth. This novel is filled with stunning parallels to today's world, portraying the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women and the impact of war on everyday life.
Drawing on the voices of atomic-bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology, Charles Pellegrino describes the events and aftermath of two days in August when nuclear devices detonated over Japan, changing life on Earth forever.
Last Train from Hiroshima offers readers a stunning “you are there” time capsule, gracefully wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino’s scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb’s survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.
At the narrative’s core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand—the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air. Thirty people are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki—where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the cataclysm at ground zero both times. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell in which Yamaguchi had been standing, placing him and a few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection, while the entire building disappeared around them.
Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within an illustrated narrative that challenges the “official report,” showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and why.
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.
Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the Western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Führer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.
Anne Frank Remembered is the astonishing autobiography of Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide the Frank family during the harrowing years of World War II.
For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband bravely risked their lives to provide food, news, and emotional support to the hidden families. Their acts of bravery are a beacon of hope and humanity amidst the darkness of the Nazi occupation.
Miep's story is not just about the past; it is a timeless reminder of the power of love and courage. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the poignant moment she places Anne's diary—a legacy of hope—into Otto Frank's hands, her memories are recounted with simple honesty and shattering clarity.
This book resonates with courage and heartbreaking beauty, offering a glimpse into the life of a true unsung hero of the Holocaust.
Partly autobiographical, this is the first of the internationally acclaimed trilogy by Judith Kerr telling the unforgettable story of a Jewish family fleeing from Germany at the start of the Second World War.
Suppose your country began to change. Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in Germany any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.
That is what happened to Anna in 1933. She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and tobogganing to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe – starting with her own small life.
Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day, her father was unaccountably missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother, in alarming secrecy, away from everything they knew – home and schoolmates and well-loved toys – right out of Germany…
Superb Stories, Daring Deeds, Fantastic Adventures
Going Solo is the action-packed sequel to Boy, a tale of Roald Dahl's exploits as a World War II pilot. Told with the same irresistible appeal that has made Roald Dahl one of the world's best-loved writers, Going Solo brings you directly into the action and into the mind of this fascinating man.
This second part of Roald Dahl's extraordinary life story takes you on a journey through his experiences in Africa and his time as a wartime fighter pilot. It is a story that is funny, frightening, and full of fantasy - as you would expect.
Join Roald Dahl in this thrilling autobiographical adventure!
Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule.
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm, and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich.
When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal, and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks...
You must understand that I did not become a resistance fighter, a smuggler of Jews, a defier of the SS and the Nazis all at once. One's first steps are always small: I had begun by hiding food under a fence.
Through this intimate and compelling memoir, we are witness to the growth of a hero. Irene Gut was just a girl when the war began: seventeen, a Polish patriot, a student nurse, a good Catholic girl. As the war progressed, the soldiers of two countries stripped her of all she loved — her family, her home, her innocence — but the degradations only strengthened her will.
She began to fight back. Irene was forced to work for the German Army, but her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her youth bought her the relatively safe job of waitress in an officers' dining room. She would use this Aryan mask as both a shield and a sword: She picked up snatches of conversation along with the Nazis' dirty dishes and passed the information to Jews in the ghetto. She raided the German Warenhaus for food and blankets. She smuggled people from the work camp into the forest. And, when she was made the housekeeper of a Nazi major, she successfully hid twelve Jews in the basement of his home until the Germans' defeat.
This young woman was determined to deliver her friends from evil. It was as simple and as impossible as that.
Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.
On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’s Nazi occupiers.
Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking. The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.”
More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!”
Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp.
The journal did eventually reach her fiancé, and for over fifty years it was kept private. In 2002, it was donated to the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris.
On August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr, a friend of William S. Burroughs from St. Louis, stabbed a man named David Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife and threw his body in the Hudson River. For eight years, Kammerer had fawned over the younger Carr, but that night something happened: either Carr had had enough or he was forced to defend himself.
The next day, his clothes stained with blood, Carr went to his friends Bill Burroughs and Jack Kerouac for help. Doing so, he involved them in the crime. A few months later, they were caught up in the crime in a different way. Something about the murder captivated the Beats, especially Kerouac and Burroughs, who decided to collaborate on a novel about the events of the previous summer.
At the time, the two authors were still unknown, yet to write anything of note. Narrating alternating chapters, they pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and art, obsession and violence, with scenes and characters drawn from their own lives.
They submitted their manuscript—called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks after an absurd line from a radio bulletin about a circus fire—to publishers, but it was rejected and confined to a filing cabinet for decades. Finally published, at long last, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks tells the story of Ramsay Allen and the object of his fixation, the charismatic, idealistic young Phillip Tourian. Phillip and his friends drink and dream in the bars and apartments of the West Village, until, with his friend Mike Ryko (Kerouac's narrator), he hatches a plan to ship out as a merchant marine. They'll catch a boat for France and jump ship, then make their way through the front to Paris.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is an engaging, fast-paced read that shows the two authors' developing styles. It is also an incomparable artifact, a legendary novel from the dawn of the Beat movement by two hugely influential writers.
In January 1945, during the waning months of World War II, a small group of people embark on the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine, to reach the British and American lines.
Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. Accompanying her is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought to her family’s farm as forced labor. There is also a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, known to the pair as Manfred, who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.
As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred—assuming any of them even survive.
Chris Bohjalian skillfully portrays the flesh and blood of history, crafting a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies. This is a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations.
They were called Easy Company—but their mission was never easy. Immortalized as the Band of Brothers, they suffered 150% casualties while liberating Europe—an unparalleled record of bravery under fire. Dick Winters was their commander—"the best combat leader in World War II" to his men. This is his story—told in his own words for the first time.
On D-Day, Dick Winters parachuted into France and assumed leadership of the Band of Brothers when their commander was killed. He led them through the Battle of the Bulge and into Germany, by which time each member had been wounded. They liberated an S.S. death camp from the horrors of the Holocaust and captured Berchtesgaden, Hitler's alpine retreat.
After briefly serving during the Korean War, Winters was a highly successful businessman. Made famous by Stephen Ambrose's book Band of Brothers—and the subsequent award-winning HBO miniseries—he is the object of worldwide adulation. Beyond Band of Brothers is Winters's memoir—based on his wartime diary—but it also includes his comrades' untold stories. Virtually all this material is being released for the first time. Only Winters was present from the activation of Easy Company until the war's end. Winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, only he could pen this moving tribute to the human spirit.
How have I been lucky enough to come here, to be alive, when so many others are not? I should have died.... But I am here.
1945. Surviving the brutality of a Nazi prison camp, Marta Nederman is lucky to have escaped with her life. Recovering from the horror, she meets Paul, an American soldier who gives her hope of a happier future. But their plans to meet in London are dashed when Paul's plane crashes.
Devastated and pregnant, Marta marries Simon, a caring British diplomat, and glimpses the joy that home and family can bring. But her happiness is threatened when she learns of a Communist spy in British intelligence, and that the one person who can expose the traitor is connected to her past.
If you start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy named Bruno. (Though this isn't a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence.
Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to encounter one.
Berlin, 1942: When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move to a new house far, far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people in the distance.
But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different from his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences.
The Day of Battle is the second volume of Rick Atkinson's epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II. This narrative delves into the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy.
Following the events in An Army at Dawn, this book chronicles the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943. It captures their relentless, bloody march north toward Rome.
The outcome of the Italian campaign was fraught with uncertainty. Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debates about the invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe. Yet, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis remained steadfast, despite the high cost.
The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult, yet the Allied forces continued to push the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Under the leadership of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, the American forces became increasingly determined and proficient.
With the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory began to seem inevitable. Atkinson draws on a wide array of primary sources, providing a narrative history of the first rank.
Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.
Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.
Le 21 mars 1943, un jeune homme de dix-huit ans monte dans un tramway, direction : le maquis. En 10 minutes, il change de nom. Désormais, il ne s'appelle plus Raymond, mais Jeannot. Ainsi débute la journée pour Jeannot sans nom et pour beaucoup de gens de son monde qui ne savaient pas encore ce qu'il leur arriverait.
The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed. By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky's literary masterpiece.
The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate, and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
D-Day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it'll be soon, and for Felicity “Flick” Clairet, the stakes have never been higher. A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage, Flick has survived to become one of Britain’s most effective operatives in Northern France. She knows that the Germans’ ability to thwart the Allied attack depends upon their lines of communications, and in the days before the invasion, no target is of greater strategic importance than the largest telephone exchange in Europe.
But when Flick and her Resistance-leader husband try a direct, head-on assault that goes horribly wrong, her world turns upside down. Her group destroyed, her husband missing, her superiors unsure of her, her own confidence badly shaken, she has one last chance at the target, but the challenge, once daunting, is now near impossible. The new plan requires an all-woman team, none of them professionals, to be assembled and trained within days. Code-named the Jackdaws, they will attempt to infiltrate the exchange under the noses of the Germans — but the Germans are waiting for them now and have plans of their own.
There are secrets Flick does not know—secrets within the German ranks, secrets among her hastily recruited team, secrets among those she trusts the most. And as the hours tick down to the point of no return, most daunting of all, there are secrets within herself...
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.
The summer that Patty Bergen turns twelve is a summer that will haunt her forever. When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, Patty learns what it means to open her heart. Even though she's Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi, but as a lonely, frightened young man with feelings not unlike her own. In Anton, Patty finds someone who softens the pain of her own father's rejection and who appreciates her in a way her mother never will. While patriotic feelings run high, Patty risks losing family, friends — even her freedom — for this dangerous friendship. It is a risk she has to take and one she will have to pay a price to keep.
Hangover Square captures the edgy, obsessive, and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel.
London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous, and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in hell until something goes click in his head, and he realizes that he must kill her.
Danzig Passage opens in the year 1936, amidst the rising tide of Nazi terrorism. In Zion Covenant #5, courageous stories unfold, depicting those who risk everything to stand against the deceitful guise of Hitler's Third Reich.
Jewish children must be evacuated as brutal Nazi reprisals break out. As the danger escalates, the narrative weaves through the heart-wrenching decisions and daring escapes that mark this turbulent era.
Join the journey as characters navigate through perilous times, showcasing resilience and bravery in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Prague Counterpoint opens in 1936, set against the backdrop of central Europe on the brink of World War II. Elisa Lindheim, a courageous heroine, finds herself caught in the heart of the turmoil as Hitler's ominous plans begin to unfold.
As the Nazi regime's deceitful power spreads, Elisa takes a bold stand, risking everything to rescue two small boys and challenge the growing tide of terrorism. Her journey is a compelling tale of bravery and resilience, offering a poignant look at the human spirit in the face of overwhelming danger.
Join Elisa and other brave souls in the Zion Covenant series as they confront the darkness with courage and hope.
Flyboys is a gripping narrative of war, friendship, and honor set against the backdrop of the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima. Nine American flyers, Navy and Marine pilots tasked with bombing Japanese communications towers, were shot down. This is their story.
One of these men was miraculously rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine, while the others faced capture by Japanese soldiers. The fate of these eight captured men was shrouded in secrecy, buried by both American and Japanese governments.
James D. Bradley takes readers on a journey to uncover the truth, navigating through dusty attics in American towns, classified government archives, and the heart of Japan, ultimately reaching Chichi Jima itself. His findings reveal a mystery stretching back 150 years, to America's westward expansion and Japan's initial encounters with the Western world.
With vivid descriptions, Bradley brings to life the courage and sacrifice of these young men, while also exploring the complex history of two nations at war. He delves into the Japanese warrior mentality and the U.S. military strategies that justified devastating attacks on civilians.
Ultimately, Flyboys is about how we live and die, epitomized by the tale of the one Flyboy who escaped capture—a young Navy pilot named George H. W. Bush, who would later become President of the United States.
This masterpiece of historical narrative will forever change our understanding of the Pacific war and the very principles we fight for.
The Great Escape is one of the most famous true stories from the last war. It narrates the extraordinary tale of how more than six hundred men in a German prisoner-of-war camp worked together to orchestrate a remarkable breakout.
Every night for a year, they dug tunnels beneath the camp. Those who weren't digging were busy forging passports, drawing maps, faking weapons, and tailoring German uniforms and civilian clothes to wear once they had escaped. All of this was done under the very noses of their prison guards.
When the right night came, the actual escape was timed to the split second. But, of course, not everything went according to plan...
Hannah thinks tonight's Passover Seder will be the same as always. But this year, she will be mysteriously transported into the past, where only she knows the unspeakable horrors that await.
Hannah resents the stories of her Jewish heritage until time travel places her in the middle of a small Jewish village in Nazi-occupied Poland. As she experiences the horrors of a concentration camp, she learns why she—and we—need to remember the past.
This critically acclaimed novel from the multi-award-winning author Jane Yolen adds much to understanding the effects of the Holocaust, which will reverberate throughout history, today and tomorrow. Readers will come away with a sense of tragic history that both disturbs and compels.
The Great Fire is a sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict. This is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War.
In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.
The Last 100 Days is a dramatic countdown of the final months of World War II in Europe, bringing to life the waning power and the ultimate submission of the Third Reich.
To reconstruct the tumultuous hundred days between Yalta and the fall of Berlin, John Toland traveled more than 100,000 miles in twenty-one countries and interviewed more than six hundred people—from Hitler’s personal chauffeur to Generals von Manteuffel, Wenck, and Heinrici; from underground leaders to diplomats; from top Allied field commanders to brave young GIs.
Toland adeptly weaves together these interviews using research from thousands of primary sources. Since its first publication, The Last 100 Days has been regarded as one of the greatest historical narratives of the twentieth century, revealing after-action reports, staff journals, and top-secret messages and personal documents previously unavailable to historians.
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage, and destruction.
Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army.
Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.
An Army at Dawn is the first volume of Rick Atkinson's monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II. This riveting narrative unfolds the dramatic story of the war in North Africa, a tale of courage and triumph, as well as calamity and miscalculation.
Atkinson masterfully illustrates why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without grasping the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. It was a pivotal point in American history, marking the moment when the United States began to act like a great power.
Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and later engage the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually transforms into a superb fighting force.
Central to this compelling tale are the extraordinary yet fallible commanders who dominated the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel. Rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's narrative provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa.
Band of Brothers, by Stephen E. Ambrose, is a gripping account of E Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. From their rigorous training in Georgia in 1942 to the dangerous parachute landings on D-Day and their triumphant capture of Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’ in Berchtesgaden, Ambrose tells the story of this remarkable company.
Repeatedly sent on the toughest missions, these brave men fought, went hungry, froze, and died in the service of their country. A tale of heroic adventures and soul-shattering confrontations, Band of Brothers brings back to life, as only Stephen E. Ambrose can, the profound ties of brotherhood forged in the barracks and on the battlefields. This narrative not only highlights the physical battles but also the emotional and psychological challenges faced by the soldiers.
On January 28, 1945, 121 hand-selected U.S. troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. Their mission: March thirty rugged miles to rescue 513 POWs languishing in a hellish camp, among them the last survivors of the infamous Bataan Death March. A recent prison massacre by Japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation.
In Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture.
Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.
To Hell and Back is the classic WWII memoir by America’s most decorated soldier, Audie Murphy. Originally published in 1949, this gripping narrative became a bestselling phenomenon and was later adapted into a major motion picture starring Murphy himself.
Rejected from both the marines and the paratroopers due to his size, Murphy was determined to serve his country. He eventually found a home with the infantry, fighting bravely through campaigns in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. Despite being under twenty-one on V-E Day, Murphy was credited with having killed, captured, or wounded 240 Germans.
He emerged from the war as America’s most decorated soldier, having received twenty-one medals, including the highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. This memoir offers a vivid, mature picture of combat and remains a perennial classic of military nonfiction.
In this classic, John le Carré's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carré brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.
Forgotten Soldier recounts the horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery.
As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. Sajer's German footsoldier’s perspective makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited."
Now it has been handsomely republished containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.