I grew up in England in the immediate aftermath of WWII but have lived most of my adult life in California. I was inspired to become a writer of fiction after the death of my mother, wanting to find a way to preserve her remarkable story. While researching for my novel I was amazed to discover the British interned some refugees from the Nazis as “enemy aliens,” and fascinated to learn about the political resistance to Churchill’s domestic policies during the last two years of the war. I am astounded by the breadth of WWII stories that focus on the resilience of ordinary citizens and I always hunger for more!
Many people don’t realize that part of the United Kingdom was occupied by the Nazis during WWII. The inhabitants of the Channel Islands, just off the shore of France, lived under German rule from 1940 through to liberation in 1945. This novel, told entirely in epistolary style with letters and a few telegrams between the characters, highlights the wartime deprivations they endured and the extraordinary resilience of ordinary citizens. The “literary society” in the title is initially a ruse to explain an unauthorized violation of curfew, but I love that it becomes a way for the characters to discover the power of books to help them survive terrible times. It was made into a movie in 2018, but of course, the book is much better.
The beloved, life-affirming international bestseller which has sold over 5 million copies worldwide - now a major film starring Lily James, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Courtenay and Penelope Wilton
'I can't remember the last time I discovered a novel as smart and delightful as this one ... Treat yourself to this book, please - I can't recommend it highly enough' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love
To give them hope she must tell their story
It's 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer's block. But when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of…
Like my novel, 22 Britannia Road sheds light on refugees in England, starting after the war when Janusz and Silvana are reunited after six years’ separation. The narrative alternates between flashbacks to the wartime traumas they each endured, and the “present” story of their struggles to rebuild their lives. When Poland is invaded, Janusz joins the underground army and makes his way to France and finally England with the anti-Nazi forces. This mirrors the story of two characters in my own novel, based on my grandfather and uncle. Silvana meanwhile escapes into the forest to hide with her infant son. When she and Janusz meet up after the war, theirs is no glossy romantic reunion; they barely know each other and both harbor secrets that must eventually come to light.
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson is a heartbreaking and powerful novel about wartime secrets and the difficulties of adjusting to postwar life
It is 1946 and Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board a ship that will take them from Poland to England. Silvana has not seen her husband Janusz in six years, but, they are assured, he has made them a home in Ipswich.
However, after living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. While Janusz, a Polish soldier who has criss-crossed Europe…
After helping her grandmother leave flowers at the graves of her three sons lost during WWII every Memorial Day, decades later, the author learned that only one is buried at home in Iowa. One is buried overseas. The other has never been found. Joy Neal Kidney had to find out…
Penelope Lively is one of my favorite British authors. She has a way of perfectly capturing her characters’ complex relationships and emotions in a quiet, understated manner. Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987, and is set mostly in Egypt during WWII, where Claudia, a strong, independent woman working as a war correspondent, falls for Tom, a British tank commander involved in fighting off the German offensive led by Rommel. This little-known part of the worldwide conflict becomes the backdrop for a passionate love affair that continues to haunt Claudia when she reflects back on her life in old age.
Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the centre of her life, Tom, her one great love both found and lost in the "mad fairyland" of war-torn Egypt.
You’ve heard of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Eichmann, and Himmler, but what about Heydrich? One of the masterminds of the terrible “final solution,” he was installed as Protector of Bohemia and Moravia under Nazi occupation and was assassinated in 1942 by two Czech patriots parachuted in by the British. I have visited the church in Prague where they were eventually hunted down and killed, so I knew I had to read this novel, and it is a delightful read. Written in short, snappy chapters, the seriousness of the underlying story is lightened by a playful double narrative with the author’s account of his own struggles while writing the book and reflections on the treatment of historical characters in fiction.
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells HHhH.
HHhH is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
When I was working on my novel, I was drawn to another writer’s debut set in WWII, this one in Leningrad. The 870-day siege of the Russian city by the Germans was something I’d heard of, but I knew nothing about the details. This novel brings to life the mass starvation and terror inflicted on ordinary citizens through the eyes of Marina, a tour guide at the famous Hermitage Museum. When she is charged with removing the artwork for its protection, she commits to memory the paintings in all their splendor and continues to give guided tours in her mind, memories that still surface decades later when her brain is rattled by dementia. This novel really made me want to go to the Hermitage—still on my bucket list.
“An extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel.” — Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker
Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America,…
In 1930s Prague, Lena meets Otto, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, and follows him to Paris to work for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. When WWII engulfs the continent, Lena gets stuck in Paris with no news from her Jewish family left behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Otto, meanwhile, has fled to England. When they are finally reunited, their relationship becomes strained as they face anti-refugee sentiment and Lena finds herself attracted to another man, while desperate for news from her family.
Based on the true story of my mother’s escape from the Holocaust, When It’s Over highlights little-known aspects of WWII: the plight of refugees in Britain, and the progressive political movement that led to Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 election.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Bernard Marks and Martha Alford met by chance. The odds were long that they would hit it off. That wasn’t in the cards they’d been dealt at birth. But, as gamblers in love, they rolled the dice. And then they worked hard, took risks, caught lucky breaks, built satisfying careers,…
