WWII adult fiction

Takeyama, Michio.  Harp of Burma (Tuttle Publishing Co., 1981).

Near the end of World War II, the Japanese are facing defeat in Burma at the hands of the British Army. After Corporal Mizushima's unit surrenders he attempts to persuade other holdouts also to surrender without a struggle, now that the war is coming to an end. They refuse and in the final battle Mizushima is injured and rescued by a Buddhist monk. Thus begins a spiritual journey for Mizushima which ends with him adopting the robes of a monk and travelling the countryside, cremating and burying the war dead. 

Thackara, James.  America’s Children (Penguin Group, Reissue, 2002).

America's Children is a multi-layered story of Christian and Marxist values; of love of family and land; of invisible high-energy particles and Pentagon technocrats; of thrilling scientific discovery and the unspeakable reality of Hiroshima. The great classical myths of man's mastery over nature suffuse America's Children with a seductive, deathly glow. A novel for our age, America's Children is a sublime and truly American story of the theft of atomic fire, the agonies of political and moral conscience, and the future of our planet in a nuclear world.

Thackara, James.  Book of Kings (Penguin Group, Reissue, 2000).

James Thackara's epic novel The Book of Kings is set across the entire continent of Europe, as well as North and South America and North Africa, in the years shortly before and during World War II and leading up to the present day. The Book of Kings tracks Europe's drift toward Nazism from 1932, when a quartet of students at the Sorbonne - David and Johannes, both German; Justin, a French/Algerian scholarship student; and Duncan, an American with an attachment to "old" Europe - share an apartment on the rue de Fleurus. The Book of Kings sounds the fate of its characters far beyond their commonplace existence as it pursues the enduring questions of absolute evil and man's responsibility. In scenes ranging from the fall of France, the Moscow front, Silesia's camps, the siege of Berlin, and the Amazon rainforests, the design of the novel emerges to reveal civilization strung between its two mortal tendencies, first in the thrall of an irresistible attraction toward cataclysm, then returning from destruction toward redemption.

Thirkell, Angela Mackail.  Miss Bunting (Moyer Bell, 1996).

From the '30s to the '60s, Thirkell wrote a novel a year, most of which were set in an updated version of Trollope's Barsetshire. This installment, originally published in 1945 is a mild and rather obvious comedy of manners set during one summer late in WWII, when traditional order is being brought to an end by the rise of industrial wealth and the damages inflicted by six years of war. The story revolves around a wide group of the upper class--primarily landowners and clergymen--who have dominated this small town, and how they will respond to arrival of a coarse but dynamic industrial tycoon. Miss Bunting is an elderly ex-governess who has been hired by one family to instruct and care for their 17-year-old daughter, Anne. There are numerous characters in the novel, some dashing in and out of the narrative with such speed that the only thing they contribute is the memory of a vaguely humorous name. Some will find the book dated, but for Thirkell's many readers in this country, it will be a welcome addition to the growing library of her work.  (Publisher’s Weekly)

Thoene, Bodie.  The Twilight of Courage (Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1996).

The Twilight of Courage is a retelling of World War II that intertwines the stories of two American journalists' escape from the collapse of Warsaw, with those of an orphaned baby's journey to Jerusalem, a mathematician's attempt to crack Nazi code, and more.

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Dunkirk Crescendo (Zion Covenant Series #7-9) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

This description covers #7 London Refrain, #8 Paris Encore, and #9 Dunkirk Crescendo. These three additions to the Zion Covenant series are "director's cuts." They include portions of the Thoene classic The Twilight of Courage and thrilling, never-before-published scenes with the characters you've come to know and love. Readers will finally know the fates of Jacob and Lori Kalner from Warsaw Requiem and meet for the first time David Meyer from The Zion Chronicles, plus Madame Rose Smith and Jerome Jardin from The Zion Legacy and, most importantly, Rachel and Yacov Lubetkin, the heroes of The Zion Chronicles series. Study questions included. 

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Warsaw Requiem (Zion Covenant Series #6) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

Book 6 of The Zion Covenant series. Heroic efforts are underway to save as many Jewish children as possible while the escalation of brutality portends an international nightmare.

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Danzig Passage (Zion Covenant Series #5) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

This sequel to Jerusalem Interlude focuses on two families during the early years of Hitler's regime. The Ibsen family has helped Jews, and two members of the mafily have been arrested. The Ibsen children are seeking a way to escape the Nazis. Peter Wallich, a Jew, is trying to escape from Berlin with his family.

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Jerusalem Interlude (Zion Covenant Series #4) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

For Jews in prewar Europe, the terrifying truth is uncovered: Truly they have no place to go. Escape or perish, but escape to where? As Central Europe is taken over by the Nazis under celebrated headlines of Peace in Our Times, hundreds of thousands pay the price for Hitler’s international deception. In Jerusalem Interlude, Leah and Shimon Feldstein finally reach the Promised Land. They enter their new life under the shadow of the Western Wall, only to find that a longer, more sinister shadow is casting its darkness over the Holy Land. Will they ever find true peace, a resting place for their spirits? Or will their time in Jerusalem be only a brief interlude in the ongoing struggle for a homeland?

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Munich Signature (Zion Covenant Series #3) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

Book 3 in the compelling Zion Covenant series, the thrilling sequel to Prague Counterpoint. Elisa Murphy holds information that might be a key to stopping Hitler.

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Prague Counterpoint (Zion Covenant Series #2) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

In this sequel to the Vienna Prelude, Elisa Lendheim is caught in the center of violence that sweeps Europe as Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews unfolds.

Thoene, Bodie and Brock.  Vienna Prelude (Zion Covenant Series #1) (Tyndale House Publishers, 2005).

Book 1 in the compelling Zion Covenant series. Her own identity was safely disguised. But what about those she loved most?

Thomas, Evan.  Sea of Thunder (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

Evan Thomas takes us inside the naval war of 1941-1945 in the South Pacific in a way that blends the best of military and cultural history and riveting narrative drama. He follows four men throughout: Admiral William ("Bull") Halsey, the macho, gallant, racist American fleet commander; Admiral Takeo Kurita, the Japanese battleship commander charged with making what was, in essence, a suicidal fleet attack against the American invasion of the Philippines; Admiral Matome Ugaki, a self-styled samurai who was the commander of all kamikazes and himself the last kamikaze of the war; and Commander Ernest Evans, a Cherokee Indian and Annapolis graduate who led his destroyer on the last great charge in the last great naval battle in history. Sea of Thunder climaxes with the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle ever fought, over four bloody and harrowing days in October 1944. We see Halsey make an epic blunder just as he reaches for true glory; we see the Japanese navy literally sailing in circles, torn between the desire to die heroically and the exhausted, unacceptable realization that death is futile; we sail with Commander Evans and the men of the USS Johnston into the jaws of the Japanese fleet and exult and suffer with them as they torpedo a cruiser, bluff and confuse the enemy—and then, their ship sunk, endure fifty horrific hours in shark-infested water.

Thorpe, Adam.  The Rules of Perspective (Picador, Re-issue, 2007).

On April 3, 1945, the advancing American army shells the historic town of Lohenfelde, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm museum. Within the museum's vaults, Heinrich Hoffer is hiding from the bombardment, and trying to keep a priceless Van Gogh from falling into the hands of a rogue Nazi. After the shelling, an American corporal, Neal Parry, finds a beautiful eighteenth-century oil painting in the rubble, and must confront both its beauty, and the morality of stealing it. The stories of Herr Hoffer, Parry, and their paintings unfold simultaneously in this gripping, brilliantly structured novel about art and war.

Trammell, Jack.  Saints Departed (Hard Shell Word Factory, 2001).

During World War II, occupied Paris was a city filled with people acting contrary to their better natures. The Saints Departed, is a novel of these ordinary/extraordinary people and their supreme moments when regimes could suddenly topple, leaders falter, and the course of war irrevocably change direction. Based on many factual plots and stories, The Saints Departed centers around an ill-fated love affair between an overconfident German agent and a female French Resistance fighter bent on revenge, who find themselves entwined in a massive conspiracy that will end either with Hitler's death and a pre-invasion peace with the Allies, or a persecution of the French people far worse than anything imaginable.

Sanchez, Thomas.  Days of the Bee (Knopf Publishing Group, 2001).

In this story of an astonishing love, Thomas Sanchez portrays the violence, hope, and grandeur of lives transformed by war and exile. At the heart of the novel are Zermano, a world-famous Spanish painter, and his beautiful French muse, Louise Collard — whose lives are torn apart by the German invasion of France in World War II. Leaving Louise in Vichy-controlled Provence, Zermano returns to occupied Paris. But while he eventually goes on to celebrity and fortune, Louise disappears into obscurity.

Fifty years later, after Louise's death, an American scholar arrives in the south of France seeking the truth about the lovers' tempestuous romance and sudden separation. Why did the painter abandon the young beauty? What was the cause of her lifelong reclusiveness? What dark mysteries were being concealed by the ill-fated couple? By chance, the professor finds a cache of correspondence — Zermano's letters to Louise in her remote mountain village, and her intentionally unmailed letters to him in Paris. In their vivid, wrenching contents he uncovers secrets that Louise kept even from Zermano about her wartime experience: the dangers of her participation in the Resistance, and her complicity with one of its leaders, the Fly; her struggles to elude a sadistic officer who hunts her for political and personal reasons; her lyrical intimacy with a mystical beekeeper. Louise is forced to make a fateful decision between the love for her man, and the ultimate sacrifice for her country.

Schlink, Bernard.  The Reader (Vintage, 1999).

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Schneider, Russ.  Siege: A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942 (Presidio Press; Reprint edition, 2004).

On January 21, 1942, more than five thousand exhausted German soldiers– fragments of retreating units–found themselves surrounded in the arctic northern Russian town of Cholm. Trapped in an area barely two kilometers wide, the freezing, starving men held out for 105 days, repelling endless infantry attacks and dozens of tank assaults. Fifteen hundred Germans died before relief finally arrived on May 5, but for those still able to fight, an even worse ordeal lay ahead–the siege of Fortress Velikiye Luki.

Following the fates of three ordinary Germans through these epic struggles, Russ Schneider captures the ferocity and titanic cruelty of a war that pushed men to the very edge of madness. Millions perished on the Russian Front during World War II. Siege is a searing testament to the forgotten men who strove valiantly, if in vain, against impossible odds.

Schwarz-Bart, Andre.  The Last of the Just (Overlook, New edition, 2000).

In every generation, according to Jewish tradition, thirty-six "just men" are born to take the burden of the world's suffering upon themselves. This powerful and austere novel tells the story of Ernie Levy, the last of the just, who died at Auschwitz in 1943.

Seiffert, Rachel.  Dark Room (Knopf Publishing Group, 2002).

A boy born with a physical deformity finds work as a photographer's assistant during the 1930s and captures on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. But his acute photographic eye never provides him with the power to understand the significance of what he sees through his camera. In the weeks following Germany's surrender, a teenage girl whose parents are both in Allied captivity takes her younger siblings on a terrifying, illegal journey through the four zones of occupation in search of her grandmother. Many years after the event, a young man trying to discover why the Russians imprisoned his grandfather for nine years after the war meets resistance at every turn; the only person who agrees, reluctantly, to help him has his own tainted past to contend with.

Serge, Victor.  The Unforgiving Years (NYRB, 2008).

Born in Brussels of Russian revolutionary exiles, Serge (1890–1947) has long had a reputation as polemicist and journalist, but this powerful novel of the descent into WWII makes a strong case for his political fiction. In the pressured atmosphere just preceding the outbreak of war, a secret agent, D., breaks with the Organization—Stalin's spy network—and escapes from Paris with his lover, Nadine. With extreme paranoia that he cloaks in exquisite manners, D. tells only one person where they are going: an old comrade named Daria. In the next, flash-forward section, Daria, having been arrested, is released from exile in a Soviet backwater and thrust into the siege of Leningrad. The third section opens in 1945 Berlin, where Daria witnesses a host of Germans, injured and half crazy, try to survive aerial bombardment—a moment that, as W.G. Sebald noted, has been deeply underserved by literature. In the final section, Daria escapes Europe and follows D. and Nadine to Mexico, escaping (she thinks) the long reach of Stalin's agents. Serge remains sophisticated even during the book's more noirish moments, and action sequences form an inseparable part of his hypnotic, prophetic vision.  (Publisher’s Weekly)

Serge, Victor.  The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics, 2004).

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.

Shaara, Jeff.  The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II (Random House, 2007).

Shaara (To the Last Man; Gone for Soldiers), who has written bestselling and critically acclaimed historical novels covering the American Revolution through World War I, takes on World War II in the wonderful first volume of a planned trilogy. As the book begins, Hitler's forces control Western Europe, and U.S. troops face off against the Germans in North Africa. From fall 1942 through spring 1943, the Allies battle Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. Shaara evokes the agony of desert warfare and the utter chaos of an airborne assault through the experiences of Pvt. Jack Logan, a tank gunner, and Sgt. Jesse Adams, a paratrooper. The challenges-and frequent frustrations-of command are seen through the eyes of such luminaries as generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Rommel. The Allied victory in Africa is followed by the conquest of Sicily and the invasion of mainland Italy in 1943. With the Italian campaign sputtering, the Allies turn to planning for the decisive event of the European theater, the cross-channel invasion of France, which is where Shaara concludes this sprawling, masterful opening act.  (Publisher’s Weekly)

Shaw, Charles.  Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (Popular Library, 1963).

Corporal Allison, a U.S. Marine, arrives on an island in the Pacific in a rubber raft, a survivor of a sunken destroyer. He finds an abandoned settlement and a chapel with one occupant: Sister Angela, a novice nun who has not yet taken her final vows. For a while they have the island to themselves, but then a detachment of Japanese troops arrives to set up a meteorological camp, forcing them to hide in a cave. 

Shaw, Irwin.  The Young Lions (University of Chicago Press, New edition, 2000).

The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.

Sheers, Owen.  Resistance (Nan A. Talese, 2008).

1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army. Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer’s wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news.
Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened.

Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers’s debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.

Shires, Reginald.  At the Age of Love (AuthorHouse, 2006).

At the Age for Love, A novel of Bangalore during World War II, is an extraordinary story of a soldier''s family waiting for his safe return from the Africa Front where he serves with a British tank unit pressing hard against the Germans in the desert of Libya. The chronicle begins with the soldier, Capt. Edward Thompson, saying goodbye to his wife Amelia and son Paddy and ends with his return at the end of the war. The story, narrated in incredible detail, tells how the boy and his mother with their relatives and friends live in this hectic military city in South India, where those who stay behind are swept along into the rushing, wild stream of British history in India during a time of war. The lives of these women--and their children--provide a bold story of Anglo-India in this multihued Indian landscape where rogues and villains and the honest, hard-working, church-going, form relationships in this bold saga as men and women cross family and racial boundaries in their search for love. The city of Bangalore with its cluster of towns around British army barracks comes alive with memorable characters and this novel follows their tense and gripping relationships. The ending, where these fun-loving characters come together in a frail boat on the peaceful Cauvery River at Seringapatnam near sunset, has much to say about life and the human mystery and the vision it offers us as we live in a changing world.

Parsons, Alexander.  In the Shadows of the Sun (Doubleday Publishing, 2005).

From award-winning novelist Alexander Parsons comes a vivid chronicle of the traumatic impact of WWII on an American family at the dawn of the nuclear age.Set in the high desert badlands of New Mexico and the ravaged, war-torn landscape of the Philippine jungle, In the Shadows of the Sun tells the story of a New Mexican ranching family — the Stricklands — struggling to hold on to their way of life in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Imprisoned by the Japanese, Jack Strickland endures the horrors of the Bataan Death March, his will to stay alive fueled by his desire to return home. A world away, forces threaten to tear his family apart. An illicit love blooms between Baylis Strickland and his brother's wife, Sara, even as the family confronts the threat of devastating loss and displacement: they have been served with an eviction notice from the War Department, which plans to build a bombing range on the land they've worked for generations.

Paul, Caroline.  East Wind, Rain (HarperCollins, 2007).

Off the lush coast of Kauai sits the almost unknown island of Niihau. Its inhabitants—mostly Hawaiian natives—lead a quiet, simple life. They work the ranch of the island's owner, Aylmer Robinson, an eccentric haole who insists that Niihau remain isolated from the outside world; no phones, cars, electricity, or other conveniences are allowed. According to Robinson's Christian view, his people must be protected from modern evils, and his island haven kept as pure as Eden before the Fall.  Then a plane crash-lands on Niihau. The Hawaiians have no idea that it's a Japanese Zero, and that the pilot—who survives the landing—has just taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Concerned primarily with the fact that visitors aren't allowed, Niihau's residents await Mr. Robinson's monthly visit from Kauai. But unknown to them, the outside world is now at war. Don 

Only the island's one Japanese-American couple, Irene and Yoshio Harada, realize the significance of the downed soldier. Convinced that Japan has successfully invaded the United States, and pressured by the desperate pilot, the Haradas face a growing dilemma. Are they loyal to America, their country, but one that has bruised them with prejudice? Or should they help the pilot, betraying their Hawaiian neighbors but saving themselves? As the Zero smolders in the Niihauan soil, and the Niihauans slowly figure out that the modern world has encroached on their remote island whether they like it or not, the Haradas see cracks in their own shaky marriage beginning to widen. Paradise, once within reach, slowly falls victim to its own isolated innocence. 

Pearce, Donn.  Nobody Comes Back (Forge Books, 2004).

Donn Pearce, the author of Cool Hand Luke, again revisits the subject of men under tremendous pressure, living and dying according to oppressive circumstances. Now, he brings you another tragic hero, thrust out of the only world he knew and forced to create one on his own terms . . . or die trying. Toby Parker was America's unwanted son. Only sixteen years old, he was too young to be enlisted in the army, but old enough to know that he didn't want to return to the life he knew: moving from new home to new home, neglected by his mother, ignored by his father, overlooked by everyone else. The war overseas promised exotic locations and adventure, but what it delivered was something else entirely. The Nazis were beginning to fall back, and the war was all but over. But the fighting still raged on in pockets of Europe. Out of the critical focus on France, only one last position needed to hold: the city of Bastogne. Thrown into battle almost immediately upon arrival, he soon found himself wounded and alone, struggling to survive and looked upon to lead. It was here that Toby was to learn what war really was, and what kind of man he was destined to become. Many American boys went into World War II, and each one lived their own nightmare, critically shaped by what they experienced. Out of the dead, even the survivors, Nobody Comes Back. Told with gritty authenticity, Donn Pearce captures the very essence of what it means to be caught under the worst circumstances imaginable, while having the strength and humanity to rise above them. 

Pears, Iain.  The Dream of Scipio (Penguin Group, 2003).

In the final days of the Roman Empire, in the years of the Black Death, in the darkest hours of World War II, three men sought refuge from the madness that surrounded them in the realm of ideas. Set in Provence at three different critical moments of Western civilization, The Dream of Scipio follows the fortunes of these men: Manlius Hippomanes, a Gallic aristocrat obsessed with the preservation of Roman civilization; Olivier de Noyen, a poet in the service of a powerful cardinal who is engaged in a treacherous plot to restore the papacy to Rome; and Julien Barneuve, a disaffected intellectual who joins the Vichy government in the hope of rescuing his own sense of humanity. Each man is in love with an extraordinary woman, and each love affair, because of its era, is ill starred.

Peet, Mal.  Tamar (Walker Books, 2005).

This lengthy Carnegie Medal-winning novel is masterfully crafted, written in cinematic prose, and peopled by well-drawn, multidimensional characters. Intense and riveting, it is a mystery, a tale of passion, and a drama about resistance fighters in the Netherlands during World War II. The story unfolds in parallel narratives, most told by an omniscient narrator describing the resistance struggle, and fewer chapters as a narrative told by 15-year-old Tamar, the granddaughter of one of the resistance fighters. The locale and time shift between Holland in 1944 and '45 and England in 1995. The constant dangers faced by the resistance fighters as well as their determination to succeed in liberating their country from German occupation come vividly to life. Dart, Tamar, and Marijke are the main characters in this part of the book. Their loyalty to one another and the movement is palpable though love and jealousy gradually enter the story and painfully change the dynamics. Other characters jeopardize the safety of the group and intensify the life-threatening hazards they face. Peet deftly handles the developing intrigue that totally focuses readers. After her beloved grandfather commits suicide, modern-day Tamar is determined to undercover the mystery contained in a box of seemingly unrelated objects that he has left for her. Peet keeps the story going back and forth in time, and readers must wait till the end of this intricate book to understand fully what happened to these courageous people. This is an extraordinary, gripping novel.  (written by Renee Steinberg for School Library Journal)

Tamar is being used as a reading book for West Sound Academy, Poulsbo, WA, all school reading program.

Review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/oct/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview26

Pella, Judith.  Homeward My Heart (Bethany House, 2004).

Cameron works as a foreign correspondent for her father's newspaper while she continues to try to obtain a Soviet visa in order to join her husband, Alex, who is not allowed to leave Russia. Blair is in Washington D.C., where husband, Gary, works for the State Department. Jackie is in California, struggling to cope with widowhood and single motherhood. All three are experiencing private heartaches that severely test their faith when Cameron's visa is suddenly approved. Blair and Jackie decide to join her in a clandestine search for their stepbrother. Danger and intrigue, courage and faith explode in a powerful conclusion.

Pella, Judith.  Written on the Wind (Bethany House, 2002).

Cameron Hayes' determination to distance herself from her famous father and establish herself as a journalist finds her back in her beloved Russia, now threatened by Hitler's greed. In Moscow she meets Dr. Alex Rostov, a once-prominent US surgeon who has been forced to return to his Russian homeland. Anger over the politics of war brings Alex and Cameron together, but will tragedy ultimately drive them apart? Cameron's sisters, Blair and Jackie, have each set out on paths certain to dismantle a family already fragmented by turmoil, within and without. Long-held secrets shimmer just beneath the surface of a family united only in name...will the trauma of war be the catalyst for peace?

Pella, Judith.  Somewhere a Song (Bethany House, 2002).

Somewhere a Song opens the day after Pearl Harbor as the daughters of newspaper tycoon Keegan Hayes suffer the aftermath on three different continents-journalist Cameron Hayes in Moscow, searching for the half-brother she's never met; Jackie in California, dangerously aligning herself with the Japanese community; and Blair in Manila, desperately seeking the whereabouts of her estranged army officer husband even as she is caught up in the terror of war. The trauma each woman experiences threatens to further drive a wedge in the Hayes family. Is there hope when the world's at war?

Petri, Romana.  Umbrian War (Toby Press, 2000).

In the hills and countryside of Umbria there is a house outside a village in which live Alcina and Aliseo, sister and brother. She is older, wiser, apparently stronger; he is younger, his head is in the clouds.  It is the last two years of war. The Germans are on the run, the local fascists engaged in a final desperate spree of cruelty and arrogance. Alcina confidently looks after the fields, runs the house and looks after Aliseo. But inside her heart there is fear, fear of loneliness and the terrible fear of death. She knows too much: her mother died giving birth to Aliseo, and her father also died young. Alcina and Aliseo join the partisans in the mountains: this experience will help her to overcome her fears. She will learn that there is space enough in her heart for all those things she previously denied, amongst them perhaps even love.

Piercy, Marge.  Gone to Soldiers (Penguin Books, 1988).

"Piercy's war takes on universality of a sort that Hemingway's war, or Mailer's war, could never have achieved...she has mastered a huge subject, dismantled a centuries-old sex barrier and widened our perceptions of both war and literature. All this in a good beach book makes GONE TO SOLDIERS a victory by any standards."  (NEWSWEEK)

Plain, Belva.  Legacy of Silence (Dell Publishing, 1996).

A woman's life changes when the Nazis come to power in Germany. Caroline Hartzinger's boyfriend becomes a Nazi and abandons her because she is half-Jewish. She escapes to America, marries a fellow refugee and gives birth to the Nazi's son.

Pope, Dudley.  Decoy (House of Strata, 2003).

It is February 1942 and the war in the Atlantic looks grim for the allied convoys. The 'Great Blackout' has started, leaving the spy centre of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire at a loss as to what the Nazis are planning. U-boat Command has changed the Hydra cipher. The Enigma cannot be broken. Cipher experts can no longer eavesdrop on Nazi command, which leaves convoys open for attack by packs of marauding Nazi submarines. Winning the battle of the Atlantic will surely give Hitler a final victory. And who can stop him? 

Pound, Ezra.  The Pisan Cantos (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2003).

Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos was written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth book of his modernist epic, The Cantos, themselves conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time. The Pisan Cantos were published in 1948 by New Directions and in the following year were awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry by the Library of Congress. The honor came amid violent controversy, for the dark cloud of treason still hung over Pound, incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Yet there is no doubt that The Pisan Cantos displays some of his finest and most affecting writing, marking an elegaic turn to the personal while synthesizing the philosophical and economic political themes of his previous cantos.

Pratt, James Michael.  Ticket Home (St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2002).

At the dawn of World War II, in rural Oklahoma, identical twins Lucien and Norman Parker are bound by the tragic death of their mother, their railroad jobs, and an abiding well of brotherly devotion. But when both fall for the prettiest girl in town, they learn the hard way that they can't share everything. It is brash Lucien who finally wins her hand, while gentle Norman must learn to live without the woman he cherishes and the brother who betrayed him. At last, reunited, and reconciled, in the war-torn South Pacific, Lucien and Norman fight side by side. But only one will return home for a bittersweet reunion, burdened with the heartbreaking loss of his brother—and the weight of a shocking secret that will haunt him for decades to come.

Priest, Christopher.  The Separation (Old Earth Books, 2005).  

In this subtle, unsettling alternative WWII history from British author Priest (The Prestige), Jack Sawyer is an RAF bomber pilot who encourages his government to distrust the peace proposal offered by renegade Nazi Rudolph Hess. At the same time, perhaps, Jack's identical twin brother, Joe, is a pacifist Red Cross staffer aiding peace negotiations with a German delegation headed by Hess. Jack's actions help shape the events we remember; Joe's lead to a truce between Germany and Britain in 1941 that results in a disturbingly familiar postwar world. Convincingly detailed diaries, scraps of published texts, declassified transcripts and more baffle a historian who tries to reconcile different realities. The brothers themselves recognize the uncertainty of motives and actions; Joe in particular struggles to believe that he's making a better future even though he realizes how much it costs him personally. Many alternative history novels are bloodless extrapolations from mountains of data, but this one quietly builds characters you care about—then leaves their dilemmas unresolved as they try to believe that what they have done is "right."  (Publisher’s Weekly)

Purser, Philip.  Lights in the Sky (Severn House, 2005).

Michael Pickup, a skilled but trouble-prone RAF pilot in the squadron which ferries agents and saboteurs in and out of Nazi-occupied Europe, finds himself despatched to neutral Sweden on an extraordinary political-warfare mission. He is to bring back two witnesses to the hideous crime that one day will be called the Holocaust, but in 1943 is little reported, and then seldom believed. Fumbling his way through the wiles of opposing factions and rival secret services, consoled by a spirited daughter of a Swedish nobleman, he steels himself for a desperate flight into the heart of darkness. His gripping and sometimes comic adventures are interwoven with the narrative of one of the witnesses to give a vivid picture of an outpost of the world at war, and cast a light on how a dreadful truth took so long to take hold.

Pynchon, Thomas.  Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin, Reprint, 2000).

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky. 

Slothrop's father was an unwitting part of the cosmic doublecross. To provide for the boy's future Harvard education, he took cash from the mad German scientist Laszlo Jamf, who performed Pavlovian experiments on the infant Tyrone. Laszlo invented Imipolex G, a new plastic useful in rocket insulation, and conditioned Tyrone's privates to respond to its presence. Now the grown-up Tyrone helplessly senses the Imipolex G in incoming V-2s, and his military superiors are investigating him. Soon he is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. 

Nathanson, E.M.  The Dirty Dozen (Cassell, New edition, 2001).

Twelve bearded, filthy GIs wait behind barbed wire, prisoners of their own army. Murderers, thieves, rapists, they wait to be sentenced to death or hard labour for life. They are the damned of the American Army. But at the last moment they are offered the opportunity of salvation: a mission just before D-Day. The chances of their getting away with it are about one in a million, but the damned don't care, and certainly don't count chances.

Nayman, Shira.  Awake in the Dark: Stories (Scribner, 2007).

Bold and deeply affecting, Awake in the Dark is a provocative and haunting work of fiction about who we are and how we are formed by history. These luminous stories portray the contemporary lives of the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators as they struggle with the legacy of their parents -- their questions of identity, family, and faith. In "The House on Kronen-strasse," a woman returns to Germany to find her childhood home; in "The Porcelain Monkey," the shocking origins of an Orthodox Jewish woman's faith are revealed; in "The Lamp," the harrowing experiences of a young woman leave her with the perfect daughter and a strange light; and in "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a patient is convinced that she shares a disturbing history with her psychiatrist. Rendered in powerful, unaffected prose, Awake in the Dark is an illuminating and startling book about the disguises we don, the secrets we keep, and the consequences of our silences.

Nemirovsky, Irene. Suite Francaise (Vintage, Reprint, 2007).

Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Suite Française tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. 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. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy—in their town, their homes, even in their hearts.

When Irène Némirovsky began working on Suite Française, 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, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.

Newton, William.  The Two-Pound Tram (Bloomsbury Publishings, 2006).

The year was 1937, and Hitler had just walked into Austria. It was also a marvelous year for clouded yellow butterflies. Wilfred and Duncan live in a big old house in Sussex, England. They spend their days catching butterflies and dreaming of escape, and only ever see their parents on Wednesdays for lunch. When their mother elopes and their already distant father takes up with other ladies, they decide that enough is enough. And they have a plan: they will leave home, go to London, and buy a tram, decommissioned by the bus and tram company, that they have seen advertised in the paper for two pounds sterling. Soon the brothers find that their adventures have begun in earnest-as they become proprietors of an old-fashioned horse-drawn tram service, then local celebrities whose tram advertises for a seaside merchant, and finally such heroes of the war effort that they receive a visit from royalty.

Niles, Douglas and Michael Dobson.  Fox at the Front (Doherty, Tom Associates, 2004).

This World War II what-if novel picks up where Fox on the Rhine (an alternate history of the Battle of the Bulge) ended, with a disillusioned Field Marshal Rommel surrendering his armies to the Allies, but continuing operations against the Nazis under the tutelage of General Patton's forces. Soon President Roosevelt sees the value of founding a German rump state to help transfer power and reconstruct the country, just as the Allies did in Italy. As the new commander of the German Republican Army, Rommel operates alongside Patton's Third Army, creating a sort of WWII "Dream Team" for war gamers. Imagining how the dignified, sympathetic German commander might have reacted to the full revelation of Nazi atrocities, Niles and Dobson depict Rommel as shaken to the very core by his complicity in Hitler's final solution. The authors' attention to military detail and maneuvers would satisfy any drill instructor, and they imbue even minor historical characters with authenticity and personality, demonstrating how an individual's actions and reactions shape history. This is a thoroughly plausible what-if scenario, and as such will please and titillate alternate history fans, WWII buffs, war gamers and others.  (Publisher’s Weekly)