First World War Fiction

1916. Young artist Sam Burke is spared death by firing squad on the battlefields of France and brought to a remote castle by the Irish Sea. At the ‘Tin Nose Shop’, he is tasked with creating intricate masks to hide the mutilated faces of his fellow soldiers from the Front. While he tries to come to terms with the death of his best friend and the promise he failed to keep, Sam and the disfigured soldiers struggle to return to their former lives and their loved ones.

In my eyes she had always been old, always been mine, always been Granny Dan. But in another time, another place, there had been dancing, people, laughter, love. . . . She had had another life before she came to us, long before she came to me. . . . She was the cherished grandmother who sang...

If you knew how dark tomorrow would be, what would you do with today? "This is the magic circus book that I have been looking for all my life."―Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of Every Heart A Doorway "With earnestness that matches the author's poignant story, narrator Petrea...

A toy soldier. A butter dish. A compass. Mundane objects, perhaps, but to the remarkable authors in this collection, artifacts such as these have inspired stories that go to the heart of the human experience of World War I. Each author was invited to choose an object that had a connection to the war - a writing kit for David Almond, a helmet for Michael Morpurgo - and use it as the inspiration for an original short story.

Nineteen gut-wrenching reports from the front lines of the War of the Worlds, as logged by Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, H.P. Lovecraft, Winston Churchill, Jules Verne, and many of the other most famous writers of the time. The most popular and acclaimed science fiction writers of today relive the Martian invasion through the eyes of their famous predecessors.

1915, London: Working in the dusty bookshop that her Aunt Violet mysteriously inherited, Hannah Merrill is accustomed to finding twists in every tale. But discovering her beloved best friend Lily-Anne – with a paperknife through her heart – in the middle of the bookshop, is not a plotline she saw coming. The case is anything but textbook. With the discovery of a coded German message, and Hannah’s instinct that Lily-Anne’s husband is keeping secrets, she determines to get to the bottom of it. She can’t do it alone though.

1898: Martian tripods lay waste to Earth's cities. The world's armies are unable to stem the tide of destruction. When all hope appears lost, common bacteria kills the alien invaders. From the ashes, the human race uses the technology left behind by the Martians to build new, advanced weapons.

Vlad flea is with his friend Crisp VC, the carrier pigeon. They are on a mission to deliver a secret message. It is March 25, 1918, and the friends are behind enemy lines. They must dodge the dog-fights, survive the trenches and seek help from the staff of the hospital tent as they race to reach Britain safely.

West Yorkshire, 1914. Newly married to Noah Jackson, Beth is happily content working on her family's market stall while Noah fulfils his dreams of being a teacher. When war erupts, Beth's peaceful life is shattered by events beyond her control. Noah enlists to fight alongside his brothers. A devastating accident occurs that changes all their lives. Once a loving home, Beaumont Farm becomes Beth's responsibility.

Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

Billy's task is to help arrange the surrender of the Vichy French forces in Algeria. But dissension among the regular army, the militia, and DeGaulle's Free French allows blackmarketeers in league with the enemy to divert medical supplies to the Casbah, leading to multiple murders. Billy must find the killers while trying to rescue the girl he loves - a British spy.

A metallic cylinder falls to earth, landing in the sands of Horsell Common, Surrey, generating curiosity and awe. But what's inside soon induces only terror. The story that unfolds is a breathless first-person account of an inconceivable reality: an extraterrestrial war has been waged on the planet.

London, the late 19th century, the pinnacle of civilization’s achievements. Little did the people know that a vastly technologically superior race of Martians was about to descend upon earth to wreak havoc on mankind. H.G. Wells revolutionized the science fiction genre—menacing aliens, a population in total panic and disarray, and fascinating yet deadly weaponry. How will the pitiable humans survive this extraterrestrial calamity? Find out in H.G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds.

On an orange-tinted evening in September 1905, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother in the ancient city of Smyrna. At the very same moment, a dashing Indian spy arrives in the harbour with a secret mission from the British Empire. He sails in to golden-hued spires and minarets, scents of fig and sycamore and the cries of street hawkers selling their wares. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the heavy smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 A New York Times Top 10 Best Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year The life of Urbain Martien—artist, soldier, survivor of World War I—lies contained in two notebooks he left behind when he died in 1981. In War and...

H.G. Wells set the standard for futuristic literature that teemed with both social commentary and a prescient view of the world to come. Here, we present The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, two of the most popular and thrilling science fiction novels ever created. First, travel with a scientist named Griffin who develops an ingenious serum that can render people completely invisible. Then follow the narrator as he describes the unthinkable: a deadly and terrifying invasion of Earth by the inhabitants of Mars. Can mankind survive?

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower on a clifftop at Bruneval, near Le Havre. The truth must be revealed. The decision was taken to launch a daring raid on the Bruneval site to try and capture the technology for further examination.

August 1, 1914, Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm II cancels the German invasion of Belgium over the objections of his generals, sending his armies east against Russia instead of west to France, and sets off a chain of events that will radically change the course of modern history. Gray Tide in the East is the best-selling counterfactual history of the First World War, if the Germans had not invaded Belgium in 1914 and thereby brought Great Britain and, eventually, the United States into the war.

It's 1918, and the Great War is entering its final phase. In Northern France, young Aimee has just found out that her mother is part of a spy network working with the British. After reluctantly befriending Marius, a German boy who has been left behind by his countrymen, she must try to help him get back behind German lines while evading traitor she has helped to discover.

Thousands of short stories were published during the First World War, which coincided with the heyday of the fiction magazine in Britain. Much of this material has never been republished since the end of the war and is virtually lost to the modern audience. This new collection is an important work of recovery, introducing little-known magazine short fiction - which was primarily written for a civilian readership - by major writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle as well as more neglected authors.