Literary Fiction War

After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef's daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.

It is the summer of 1967. Leo Suther is about to turn 18. This is the summer that everyone has something to teach Leo. His father warns him that "life can turn on a dime." Allie, his girlfriend, wants to teach him about love. Her father, the local communist and civil rights organizer, lectures him on politics and carpentry. And Ryder, a family friend, wants to show Leo the magic of the harmonica, harp of the blues. However, when Leo's life threatens to come unglued, it's his mother's wisdom he turns to. Though she died before Leo was five, her voice lives on in her diaries and poems.

On a Mississippi morning in 1859, Emily Matthews begs her father to save a slave, Nathan, about to be auctioned away from his family. Judge Matthews is an abolitionist who runs an illegal school for his slaves, hoping to eventually set them free. One, a woman named Ginny, has become Emily's companion and often her conscience - and understands all too well the hazards an educated slave must face. Yet even Ginny could not predict the tangled, tragic string of events set in motion as Nathan's family arrives at the Matthews farm.

From Shanghai before and during the Second World War to US occupied Tokyo, and, finally, to the Middle East in the early 1970s, Ian Buruma's masterful novel about the intoxicating power of collective fantasy follows three star-struck men driven to extraordinary acts by their devotion to the same legendary woman. A beautiful Japanese girl born in Manchuria, Yamaguchi Yoshiko is known as Ri Koran in Japan, Li Xianglan in China, and Shirley Yamaguchi in the US, and her past is a closely guarded secret.

Wally Baker is no ordinary girl. Living in her grandparents' Brooklyn Heights brownstone, she doesn't like dresses, needlepoint, or manners. Her love of Wonder Woman comics and ants makes her feel like a misfit - especially in the shadow of her dazzling but unstable mother, Stella. Acclaimed author Elizabeth Gaffney's irresistible novel captures postwar Brooklyn through Wally's eyes, opening on V-J day, as she grows up with the rest of America.

Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, Bright Morning of Pain, which was essentially a novelization of Helen’s all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in modern-day New Haven. In Conscience, Alice Mattison paints the nuanced relationships between the palpable personalities of Olive, Griff, and Jean with her signature wit and precision.

1944: Leo Stern arrives at the Nazi camp at Borek with his wife, Irena, and his two daughters. The Sterns are spared from the gas chamber when they witness a murder. But in a place that humanity has deserted, Leo is forced to make unimaginable choices to try to keep his family alive. 1961: For 17 years, Hanna has been unable to remember her identity and how she was separated from her family at the end of the war, until the discovery of a letter among her late uncle's possessions reveals her real name—Hanna Stern—and leads her to Berlin in search of her lost past.

At the dawn of World War Two, German-born nurse Emma Taylor sits by the bedside of a Jewish heiress in London as she reminisces over her dear friend, Oscar Wilde. As the story of Wilde unravels, so does Emma’s past. What really happened to her husband? She’s taken back to her days in Singapore on the eve of World War One. To her disappointing marriage to a British export agent, her struggle to fit into colonial life, and the need to hide her true identity.

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser. Skimming through those West Country roads on her motorcycle, Lottie Prideaux defies the expectations of her class and sex as she covertly studies to be a vet. In a world torn asunder by war, everything dances in flux: how can the old ways life survive, and how can the future be imagined, in the face of such unimaginable change?

I was twelve when the coat was made. Nathan, our tailor and dear friend, cut it for Grandfather in the first week of March 1938. It was the last week of freedom for Warsaw and for us... Even in the most difficult of lives, there is hope. And sometimes that hope comes in the form of a small boy...

Giugno 1940. I nazisti occupano Parigi e gli abitanti fuggono verso le campagne. Irène Némirovsky era tra loro e in questo romanzo incompiuto ha saputo raccontare la gioia nascosta sotto la tragedia della vita: le famiglie Pèricand e Michaud, Lucile Angellier e Bruno von Falk, sono alcuni dei memorabili personaggi di una delle più belle sinfonie che la letteratura abbia composto.

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature. In novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana, sex and violence were examined with vivid clarity. These realists soon adopted the word naturalism to describe their writings.

In the charnel house that was Europe in the Second World War, there were few instances of shining moral courage, let alone secular sainthood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and Nazi resister, was the exception. This emblematic figure risked his life, and finally lost it, through his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler and topple his regime.

The test of enemy fire refines a man's courage. Duty refines a man's character. Donland must face challenges by enemies at sea, calm seas and sudden fierce storms. The Caribbean and Windward Islands are beset with pirates and privateers plundering for themselves or their French masters. His greatest challenge lies in balancing his relationship as Hornet's Captain with those he would call friend. He must sit idly by and observe the Battle of Grenada as French and English ships-of-line pound each other

Jo finds out that Jewish children are being smuggled away from the Nazis over the mountains near his village. All goes to plan until German soldiers start patrolling the mountains, and Jo realises the children are trapped. Jo's slightest mistake could have devastating consequences.

Chaque été, Charles invite Antoine chez ses grands-parents, en Dordogne. Alors que tout les sépare - Antoine est boursier, Charles est fils de receveur des finances -, les deux adolescents partagent une amitié sans concession, une de celles qui aident à se surpasser. Un été, ils rencontrent Séverine, étudiante comme eux à Périgueux. Entre ces trois êtres, un lien se noue, fait d'amour et d'amitié. Mais ce bonheur que nul ne croyait menacé se brise à la fin de l'été 1939 : comme des milliers de jeunes, Charles, Antoine et Séverine vont devoir entrer en résistance pour retrouver l'harmonie perdue et la paix des saisons.

Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so begins the journey, centered around a solemn mission, but, as in the first book, a protest against injustice and celebration of life, too, at once irreverent, funny, profane, and deeply moving.

In Erinnerung an seine Kindheit macht sich der Erzähler auf die Suche nach der ehemaligen Besitzerin einer Imbissbude am Hamburger Großneumarkt. Er findet die hochbetagte Lena Brücker in einem Altersheim und erfährt die Geschichte ihrer "schönsten Jahre" und wie es zur Entdeckung der Currywurst kam. Der Bogen spannt sich weit zurück in die letzten Apriltage des Jahres 1945.

As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise" - a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm - until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions.

Die ersten Texte, die Uwe Timm verfasst hat, entstanden in einer Wohngemeinschaft mit Benno Ohnesorg. Ohnesorg war sein erster Leser und hatte in diesen Jahren ein sehr enges Verhältnis zu Uwe Timm. Nach "Am Beispiel meines Bruders" der zweite große biographische Roman von Uwe Timm.