Titres dans 20e siècle

London, December 1943. As the Russian army repels German forces from Stalingrad, Maggie Hope takes a much-needed break from spying to defuse bombs in London. But Maggie herself is an explosion waiting to happen. Traumatized by her past, she finds herself living dangerously - taking huge risks, smoking, drinking, and speeding through the city streets on a motorbike. The last thing she wants is to get entangled in another crime.

Six-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks. As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They mean to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl's unscheduled train reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor.

Nineteen-year-old Libby moves to Berlin to escape her suffocating family - but instead of offering freedom, the city is under siege by the Nazis. Jewish books are burned, storefronts smashed and every day innocent people vanish into thin air. Libby cannot - will not - turn a blind eye. When Libby meets Harro, she knows there’s more to him than his dazzling smile and cornflower-blue eyes. The whip marks on his back, scars from the SS, tell his true story: He is a resistance fighter.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe.

Antoinette and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel know they’re destined for something better. Abandoned by their family at a young age, they’ve grown up under the guidance of nuns preparing them for simple lives as the wives of tradesmen or shopkeepers. At night, their secret stash of romantic novels and magazine cutouts beneath the floorboards are all they have to keep their dreams of the future alive.

1940. Aiyi Shao is a young heiress and the owner of a formerly popular and glamorous Shanghai nightclub. Ernest Reismann is a penniless Jewish refugee driven out of Germany, an outsider searching for shelter in a city wary of strangers. He loses nearly all hope until he crosses paths with Aiyi. When she hires Ernest to play piano at her club, her defiance of custom causes a sensation. His instant fame makes Aiyi’s club once again the hottest spot in Shanghai. Soon they realize they share more than a passion for jazz - but their differences seem insurmountable....

On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors.

Plymouth, 1941. As sirens blare all around, the Shawbrook family take refuge in a packed shelter. Bombs have already begun to fall through the night sky when they realize their infant son, Freddie, has been forgotten in the rush, left to sleep in his crib. Terrified, Vera, his young mother, races to find him and bring him to safety. The next morning, air-raid warden David Shawbrook returns from his watch to find the shelter pulverized, and his family seemingly all dead. Dirty footprints inside their home betray the looters who have rifled through the house.

In the desolate middle of the largest ocean on earth, two great navies approached, one bent on conclusive battle, the other lying in ambush. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto again crossed the Pacific with the largest and most powerful naval armada the world had ever seen, this time to finish the job. Nimitz waited for him with what he had, placed exactly where he needed it. Both admirals depended on their fliers, some veterans of battle, others raw and unproven. Striking first meant decisive victory.

Filled with breathtaking images and historical detail, Danielle Steel's novel introduces one of her most unique and fascinating characters: Annabelle Worthington, a remarkable woman - a good woman - who triumphs against overwhelming odds. More than compelling fiction, her story is a powerful celebration of life, dignity, and courage - and a testament to the human will to survive.

For fans of The Rose Code and The Paris Library, The Librarian of Burned Books is a captivating WWII-era novel about the intertwined fates of three women who believe in the power of books to triumph over the very darkest moments of war.

For twenty-one-year-old Grace Fitzgerald, life is finally looking bright. Orphaned as a child and later struck down by polio, she then endured years of cold indifference at the hands of her sister Agnes. Now, with Agnes finally gone, Grace has found love with her handsome young husband and peace surrounded by friends in her home village of Knocknashee and in her ongoing friendship with the American journalist Richard Lewis.

Occupied France is a dangerous place for Luke and Christine, especially when they are the children of a French mother and a British father. Desperate to escape, the two teenagers embark on a perilous journey back to England to the safety of their grandparents. But there are eyes everywhere.

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabo's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned.

In 1944, twenty-three-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina, a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess’s new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife, and shows no interest in making love. Tess quickly realizes she’s trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out.

As the Nazis march toward Paris in 1940, American ballerina Lucie Girard buys her favorite English-language bookstore to allow the Jewish owners to escape. Lucie struggles to run Green Leaf Books due to oppressive German laws and harsh conditions, but she finds a way to aid the resistance by passing secret messages between the pages of her books.

For Iris, each visit to her mother in St Mabon’s Cove, Cornwall has been the same—a serene escape from the city. But today, as she breaths in the salt air on the doorstep of her beloved childhood home, a heavy weight of anticipation settles over her. Iris knows she’s adopted, but any questions about where she came from have always been shut down by her parents, who can’t bear to revisit the past. Now, Iris can’t stop thinking about what she’s read on the official paperwork: BABY GIRL, FRANCE, 1939 – the year war was declared with Nazi Germany.

In 1942, London, Nancy Mitford is worried about more than air raids and German spies. Still recovering from a devastating loss, the once sparkling Bright Young Thing is estranged from her husband, her allowance has been cut, and she’s given up her writing career. On top of this, her five beautiful but infamous sisters continue making headlines with their controversial politics. Eager for distraction and desperate for income, Nancy jumps at the chance to manage the Heywood Hill bookshop while the owner is away at war.

When Rosie Frost was jilted on her wedding day, she didn’t think life could get any worse. But six years later in the throes of the Second World War, she is unceremoniously dismissed from her job after they discover her illegitimate child. Thankfully, top secret war office Bletchley Park recognises Rosie’s talent and recruits her to decipher their Italian naval signals. Proud to be doing her bit for the war effort, Rosie settles into her new life.

October 1940. When VAD nurse Evie narrowly escapes being killed in an air raid during the London Blitz, it propels her to make a life-changing decision to break free of her troubled and unhappy life. She escapes to the Norfolk countryside to start afresh, with a job at the newly opened Great Plumstead Hall hospital, and a wonderful new home at Rookery House. The community of Great Plumstead welcomes evacuees to the village—mothers and children bombed out of their London homes. Sisters Prue and Thea, along with members of The Mother's Day Club, help the new arrivals settle in.