Literary Fiction War

Christmas Eve, 2019. Ninety-four-year-old Molly lies in her hospital bed. A stroke and a fall may have broken her body - but her mind is alive with memories. London, 1940s. Molly is a bright young woman, determined to help the war effort and keep her head up despite it all. Life becomes brighter when she meets and falls in love with a man who makes her forget everything with one dance. But then war forces her to make an unforgettable sacrifice.

Inspired by the stories told by her father about his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for 50 years, Motherland is a novel that attempts to reckon with the paradox of the author's father - a product of her grandparents' fiercely protective love - and their status as passive Nazi-sympathizers known as Mitläufer.

Lucia is a young Italian girl from a bourgeois fascist family. In the early 1940s, when she first hears about the atrocities being perpetrated in the Nazi concentration camps, she is doubtful and confused, unable to reconcile such stories with the ideology in which she's been raised. Wanting to disprove these "slanders" on Hitler's Reich, she decides to see for herself, running away from home and heading for Germany, where she intends to volunteer as camp labor. The journey is a harrowing, surreal descent into hell.

In 1948, Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their other daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn't remember.

Considered to be one of Virginia Woolf's most popular novels, Mrs. Dalloway follows one high-society woman as she goes about her day planning a splendid party for her acquaintances. As she goes about her day, she ponders on the life she could be living had she not married the reliable Richard Dalloway and instead sought the enigmatic Peter Walsh. At one point, she muses on the fact that she had not the option to be with a close female friend of hers. The novel then takes a turn to follow Septimus Smith, First World War veteran plagued with deferred traumatic stress.

Großartig und nervtötend, liebevoll und erdrückend, aufopfernd, aber auch übergriffig - Michel Bergmann liebt seine Mutter Charlotte und hält sie manchmal nicht aus. Er erzählt in diesem Buch, in dem er nichts und niemanden schont, die Geschichte dieser eigenwilligen, starken Frau: ihre Vertreibung aus Deutschland, der Verlust fast der gesamten Familie, das Glück, ihren künftigen Ehemann wiederzufinden, und dennoch ein Schicksal, bei dem sie allzu oft ganz auf sich allein gestellt ist. Das Lied "A Jiddische Mame" wird gesungen von Vivian Kanner.

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.

Young Dorothy is trapped in a life of poverty and heartache. Abandoned by a mother who never loved her, she is forced to live with grandparents who care even less for her than they do for their own bratty children. Dorothy must persevere and hold on to the distant memory of her loving father with only a tin of letters and a small toy soldier to remind her of her former life of wealth and privilege. Just when Dorothy thinks life has nothing left to offer, a letter arrives, inviting her to visit her father in London. Will this be the opportunity Dorothy has been waiting for?

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.

Billy Flynn always wanted to fly. An attractive young man, a patriot, he is also an artist with pencil and paint and has an abiding affinity for nature. It's 1970 and he cannot resist the call to serve in Vietnam. A year later he is the only survivor when his helicopter is shot down. A Catalog of Birds is the story of a family and a community confronted with a loss of innocence and wounds that may never heal. The legacy of war and its destruction of nature is seared onto the memories of a small American town.

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?

“The legendary Karen Robards brings her formidable talents to bear in The Moonlight Runner, an epic tale of love and female heroism.” –Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of Last Twilight in Paris In the wake of the Great War, a young woman joins the Irish rebellion and risks...

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.