World War II Fiction
“Leaving Poland for England at the end of World War II, Silvana is accompanied by eight-year-old, near-feral Aurek, with whom she shares traumatic wartime memories that set them apart from her husband, who has remade himself as an Englishman to forget the past (From the Publisher).”
By Karen Hesse
An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the population from the invading Japanese.
By Kate Quinn
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
When pregnant American student Charlie St. Clair is banished to Europe by her family to have her baby, she takes the opportunity to head for London to find her missing French cousin and teams up with Eve, a former spy from the Alice Network, to solve the mystery.
After surviving the genocide in their homeland, Maral Pegorian and her family arrive in Paris to start a new life, but they soon realize that the Nazi Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured.
By Anthony Doerr
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services, Rosalia White, Library Clerk
A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
By Scott Snyder
Series American Vampire Series
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
This volume of the critically-acclaimed AMERICAN VAMPIRE follows the star of AV Volumes 1 and 2, Pearl, and her husband Henry, as he is recruited by a mysterious group of vampire hunters, off to World War II Japan to find a new breed of blood sucker. But what does the notorious vampire Skinner Sweet have to do with it?
By Elise Hooper
Recommended By Lisa V., Library Clerk
An American Army nurse serving in Manila in 1941 is captured as a prisoner of war by the Japanese Army and teams up with a Filipina university student and resistance member to fight back and save lives.
By Helen MacInnes
A British officer pretending to be French tries to find the Nazi plans for resisting invasion off the coast of France during World War II.
By Ian McEwan
In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.
Became the movie: Atonement
By Iain Lawrence
In the spring of 1943, sixteen-year-old Kak, desperate to escape his abusive parents, lies about his age to enlist in the Canadian Air Force and soon finds himself based in England as part of a crew flying bombing raids over Germany.
This novel depicts life in postwar Pennsylvania through the struggles of one widow trying to raise five children.
By Mark Sullivan
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian
A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps but is forced by his parents to enlist as a German soldier for his own protection, where he becomes a spy for the Allies.
By Ruta Sepetys
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
In 1941, Lina and her family are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia.
By Jacqueline Winspear
Series Maisie Dobbs Novels
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
“The eponymous heroine of Winspear's promising debut, Maisie Dobbs (2003), continues to beguile in this chilling, suspenseful sequel set in England a decade after the end of the Great War (From Publishers Weekly).”
By Connie Willis
Series Oxford Time Travel Novels
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian
Stranded in World War II England, three researchers from the future investigate period behavior and seek each other out in a shared effort to return to their own time.
By Piero degli Antoni
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
“Two elderly survivors of Auschwitz recall the harrowing night when they and eight other prisoners were ordered to pick which of their number would be executed at dawn, a choice marked by shocking revelations and wrenching debates (From the Publisher).”
By Marcus Zuzak
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services
Wednesday, January 27, 2010. 7 PM.
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel - a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
The son of prosperous landowners in rural California befriends the sons of field workers who must contend with the changes that occur after the bombing of Pearl Harbor scatters one each into the army, an internment camp and into hiding.
By Gloria Goldreich
Recommended By Susan L., Library Page
Artist Marc Chagall's family is targeted in Nazi-occupied Paris, and when his daughter, Ida, falls in love, Chagall angrily paints an empty wedding chair leaving Ida to either forge her own path or save Marc from his enemies and himself.
Set against the backdrop of the Los Banos prison raid––one of the most daringepisodes of World War II - Broken Jewel tells a powerful story of war, love, and survival.
By Julie Otsuka
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian
Tuesday, August 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
By Herman Wouk
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director
Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life-and mutiny-on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has become a perennial favorite of readers young and old, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, and has achieved the status of a modern classic.
By Joseph Heller
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian
Tuesday, September 29, 2015. 1:30 PM.
Depicts the struggles of a U.S. airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II base.
Became the movie: Catch 22.
By Leslie Marmon Silko
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager
Deeply scarred Tayo, a WWII veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation.
It’s World War II and Charlotte has been trained to be an undercover courier for England. She straps on a parachute and falls from the sky into Vichy France. There she will assist the French Resistance in its defiance of Nazi occupation. Once behind enemy lines, she keeps secret her personal mission to find her lover, an RAF pilot downed over France.
Became the movie: Charlotte Gray
By Heather Morris
A novel based on a true story follows a Russian woman who is forced by a concentration-camp commandant to become his lover and is subsequently sent to Siberia after being found guilty of collaborating with the enemy.
By David Benioff
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian
Documenting his grandparents' experiences during the siege of Leningrad, a young writer learns his grandfather's story about how a military deserter and he tried to secure pardons by gathering hard–to–find ingredients for a powerful colonel's daughter's wedding cake.
By David R. Gillham
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services
Tuesday, January 28, 2014. 1:30 PM.
Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family.
By Ariel Lawhon
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian
A novel based on the life of spy Nancy Wake follows a woman who kills a Nazi and becomes one of the most decorated women in World War II.
By Elizabeth Wein
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director
With Pam Strudler, Librarian, Sharon Long, Teen Librarian
Tuesday, July 22, 2014. 1:30 PM.
In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage and great courage as she relates what she must do to survive.
The town is the home base where the characters live in the period before and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1959, Haruko marries the Prince of Japan, becoming the first commoner to enter the mysterious world of Japanese royalty.
By Lissa Evans
Recommended By Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference
A precocious orphan evacuee and a debt-ridden widow con artist forge an unlikely alliance and take advantage of unscrupulous money-making opportunities in the bombed suburbs of World War II England.
By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
A highly anticipated sequel to the best-selling Moloka'i follows the story of quarantined leprosy patient Rachel Kalama's daughter, who is raised by adoptive Japanese parents on a California grape farm before her unjust internment during World War II.
"Daughters of the Dragon" tells the life story of Ja-hee, a 14-year-old Korean girl taken by the Japanese to be a sex slave, or 'comfort woman' for the Imperial Army. Ja-hee suffers terribly at the hands of the Japanese. Now with Japanese gone, she must carry on an important family legacy.Her terrible ordeal shapes the rest of her life as she finds and loses true love in the surreal communism of North Korea. After escaping to the south, she's forced to run a kijichon (brothel) for the American military in South Korea. Finally, she finds success in the cold capitalism of South Korea's economic boom until her coworkers discover that she was a comfort woman. But through courage and strength, she's able to fulfill her duty to her family.Set within the tumultuous backdrop of 20th century Korea, this book will make you cry and cheer for Ja-hee. In the end, you'll have a better understanding of the Land of the Morning Calm.
By A. J. Pearce
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian
An adventurous young woman takes a typist job to assist the war effort and lands in the employ of a renowned advice columnist before she begins secretly replying to heart – wrenching letters rejected as unsuitable.
By Kate Quinn
Known as Lady Death– –a lethal hunter of Nazis– – Mila Pavlichenko, sent to America on a goodwill tour, forms an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and a connection with a silent fellow sniper, offering her a chance at happiness until her past returns with a vengeance.
By Jackie Copleton
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
A tale set against the atomic bombing of Nagasaki follows the experiences of a woman who is driven apart from her daughter and grandson by a love affair and painful life circumstances that force her to harden her heart to survive.
By Kate Morton
A long-lost letter arriving at its destination fifty years after it was sent lures Edie Burchill to crumbling Milderhurst Castle, home of the three elderly Blythe sisters, where Edie's mother was sent to stay as a teenager during World War II.
By Ronald H. Balson
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian
The National Jewish Book Award-winning author of The Girl From Berlin explores the human cost of war and the consequences of survival in the story of a Polish business owner who seeks justice for a wartime betrayal.
By Allison Amend
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian
A lonely spinster who works as a secretary for the Office of Naval Intelligence is sent on a secret mission to the Galapagos Islands with a much younger intelligence officer.
By Lisa Scottoline
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
An aspiring writer, an athlete from a professional cyclist family and a mathematics prodigy find their bond tested by a love triangle and the spread of anti-Semitism and fascism in 1937 Italy.
By Chris Cleave
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
Shocking her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort in 1939 London, socialite Mary teaches evacuated and marginalized children and bonds with her employer, Tom, before their romance is challenged by a painful love triangle and the grueling realities of the war.
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
“This highly imaginative debut novel features a protagonist with the same name as the author… His mission, as he ventures through the farmlands, is to find Augustine, who may have saved the grandfather he never knew from the Nazis (Library Journal).”
By Jennifer Steil
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director
The daughter of respected Jewish music artists finds her culturally rich life in 1938 Vienna shattered by the Nazi invasion and a devastating secret that threatens her efforts to start over in a Bolivian Andes refugee community.
By Ken Follett
A ruthless enemy assassin known as "The Needle" can guarantee Nazi victory in World War II, but his mission is hampered by a lonely Englishwoman who has fallen in love with him.
By Alison Pick
“Holding onto the hope that he and his family will be able to weather the oncoming Nazi occupation, Pavel Bauer, a fiercely patriotic secular Jew, finds his world unraveling as his government, business partners, and neighbors turn their backs on him and his family (From the Publisher).”
Silvio, a middle-aged man enjoying his wine and his solitude, is drawn back into the life of his family and the village by the arrival of a cousin and the revelation of long-hidden secrets in a small French village in the years before the onset of World War II.
Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood to run a cafe, Franboise Dartigen soon finds that hidden among her mother's recipes are clues that will lead her to the truth of long ago.
By David John
As Berlin welcomes the world to the Summer Olympic Games in 1936, British journalist Richard Denham and American reporter Eleanor Emerson are drawn into a deadly game involving the Gestapo and the British Secret Intelligence Service.