I grew up exploring the semi-decayed air-raid shelters near my grandmother’s home in London—to her horror: she said they were full of rats and drunks. The Second World War and its effect on people, especially women, off the frontline has long fascinated me. To pursue my obsession with writing stories on this subject, I have made trips to genocide memorials in former Yugoslavia, bunkers in Brittany, and remote towns in Poland. My novels concern themselves with how the violence, and sometimes heroism, of the past trickles down a family’s bloodline, affecting later generations of women.
Julia is a famous actress in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. She’s married to a Jewish man, whom she ends up having to hide from the Nazis in their apartment, assisted by their loyal housekeeper. Little by little life becomes impossible. Julia’s charming, tolerant, very ‘Viennese’, acquaintances and fellow actors find it’s no longer possible to turn a blind eye to what the Nazis intend. Jewish friends including the elderly and very young, are murdered, deported, and persecuted. And then at the end, the Red Army moves into Vienna and one of the saddest things of all happens… There are two further books in the same series about post-war Austria, but this one is my favourite.
Vienna, 1938. Beautiful actress Julia Homburg and her politician husband Franz Wedeker embody all the enlightened brilliance of their native city. But Wedeker is Jewish, and just across the border the tanks of the Nazi Reich are primed for the Anschluss.
When the SS invades and disappearances become routine, Franz must be concealed. With daring ingenuity, Julia conjures a hiding place. In the shadow of oppression, a clear conscience is a luxury few can afford, and Julia finds she must strike a series of hateful bargains with the new order if she and her husband are to survive.
The Blitz is over, but Stella lives in a London that is still at war. She moves from flat to flat and her professional life is bound by state secrecy. Her relationship with her lover isn’t what it seems, either, and that seems a metaphor for life in wartime London (or perhaps it’s the other way round). Little in the capital is constant or stable, in contrast with the country houses she retreats to. There’s a tautness to this book that means I have returned to it several times.
It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
I loved all the Bernie Gunther books (and really need to read them all again in chronological rather than publication order), but this one, set in Berlin and Czechoslovakia in 1941, has stayed with me. There’s something disturbing about saying that I ‘enjoyed’ what is at times almost a country house murder when the host is Heydrich and the guests some of the most evil men in the Reich, but I was gripped. Bernie himself is one of the strongest voices in fiction.
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD
Bernie Gunther returns to his desk on homicide from the horrors of the Eastern Front to find Berlin changed for the worse.
He begins to investigate the death of a railway worker, but is obliged to drop everything when Reinhard Heydrich of the SD orders him to Prague to spend a weekend at his country house. Bernie accepts reluctantly, especially when he learns that his fellow guests are all senior figures in the SS and SD.
The weekend quickly turns sour when a body is found in a room locked from…
I could have chosen any of the three in Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, about a young couple who rush to get married on the eve of war and find themselves living first in Romania, then Athens (the setting for this book), and finally Cairo. I love the portrait of Athens in the period before the German invasion: the beauty of Greece in springtime, the shortages of food, the strange collection of people making up the expatriate community, and how the marriage of two young, probably mismatched people, is tried by the constant presences of war and death. The characters who drift along with the Pringles are beautifully drawn studies in their own right.
It is 1940, and Guy and Harriet Pringle and their friends in the English colony in Bucharest find their position growing ever more precarious. The 'phoney war' is over and invasion by the Germans is an ever-present threat. Harriet finds her new husband's idealism clashing with her own more down-to-earth attitudes, his generosity to all comers frustrating her attempts to survive in a city of shortages. Their easy life among Bucharest's cafe society is gradually eroded as rumours become reality, and the Germans march in. The Spoilt City is a dramatic and colourful portrait of a city in turmoil -…
Secrets, misunderstandings, and a plethora of family conflicts abound in this historical novel set along the Brazos River in antebellum Washington County, East Texas.
It is a compelling story of two neighboring plantation families and a few of the enslaved people who serve them. These two plantations are a microcosm…
I’m cheating here a bit as the novel’s set in Paris before the Second World War and covers a variety of locations, including the Sudetenland and Budapest. But it is foreshadowed by war. Furst writes travel pieces as well as fiction and it shows in the way he brings the brasseries, the Seine, and the apartments, along with the abattoirs, railway sidings, and threatening outlying backstreets to life in his books, many of which return to Paris again and again.
A novel of adventure and intrigue in wartime Europe
Paris, 1938. Nicholas Morath, former Hungarian cavalry officer, returns home to his young mistress in the 7th arrondissement. He's been in Vienna where, amid the mobs screaming for Hitler, he's done a quiet favour for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat and, desperate to stop his country's drift into alliance with Nazi Germany, he trades in conspiracy - with SS renegades, Abwehr officers, British spies and NKVD defectors, leading Morath deeper and deeper into danger as Europe edges towards war.
A young woman arrives in wartime Cairo to train as an intelligence officer in wartime Yugoslavia, falling in love with the man who trains her in the brutal survival techniques she will need. After the war, having returned from operations in Croatia that nearly killed her, she finds herself imprisoned in an asylum back in England, accused of attempted murder. Has her time with the Yugoslav Partisans left her too dangerous for peacetime life?
Those People Behind Us is set in the summer of 2017, post-Trump election and pre-pandemic. The story takes place in the fictional city of Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices. These divisions change the lives of five neighbors--a real estate…
Four sisters in hiding. A grand duchess in disguise. Dark family secrets revealed. An alternate future for the Romanovs from Jennifer Laam, author of The Secret Daughter Of The Tsar.
With her parents and brother missing and presumed dead, former Grand Duchess Olga Romanova must keep her younger sisters…
