The best World War II books with unexpected love stories

Tales of enemies who become lovers – whether from warring families or rival gangs – are as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and Tony and Maria.

Setting this story during an actual war heightens the tension. This book will draw you in from the start.

Josef Landermann sails aboard a German U-boat, hunting Allied supply ships in the waters of the Gulf Coast. Helen Mason is the embittered Alabama widow of a US Army Air Force pilot killed by the Luftwaffe. How Josef and Helen come together is a remarkable, enchanting true story.

Woven around themes of love and forgiveness, The Heart Mender is a thrilling page-turner that will touch your heart.

Multi-layered portrayals, and an absorbing, beautifully penned story shine through Sharon Maas’s The Soldier’s Girl, a novel at once heartbreaking and inspiring.

The protagonist, Sibyl Lake, works as a spy for the French Resistance in the Nazi-annexed region of Alsace. Two men vie for her affection: Jacques, her childhood sweetheart, now a Resistance fighter, and Wolfgang, a German officer and the target of her espionage mission.

Sibyl’s courage, identity, and very soul are forced to the brink as she fights for her beloved land, clutched in Germany’s oppressive control. Maas’s unforgettable characters reveal their humanity – through love and loss – and will abide in the reader’s heart long after the final page.

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, is set in war-torn France during the Nazi occupation.

In riveting and luminous detail, the narrative interweaves the stories of two young people on opposite sides of the war – Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl fleeing Paris, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan, ensnared by Hitler’s war machine.

The book is epic in scope, tracing the lives of each character through the decades leading up to, during, and after World War II. Some might question whether Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s is truly a love story, but I’ll leave that for the captivated reader to decide.

April in Paris presents a perspective not often seen in World War II fiction: the first-person account of a German soldier.

Fluent in French, Corporal Roth is assigned to interpret prisoner interrogations in Nazi-occupied Paris. Disturbed by the torture he witnesses, Roth escapes his repugnant duties by posing as a Frenchman when off-duty, attempting to shed his identity as “occupier” by blending in with the populace.

He encounters the beautiful Chantal and ardently pursues her, unaware that she is part of the Resistance. Love ripens between Roth and Chantal, but the outcome spins out of their control, as both are hurled toward the perilous consequences of their affair.

Wallner’s fast-paced novel is more thriller than romance, as human emotion collides with the brutality of war. 

How does The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society fit into my list of WWII books with unexpected love stories?

I was initially drawn to this epistolary novel by the romance between Englishwoman Elizabeth McKenna and German officer Christian Hellman. It appeared to be, like my own novel, a tale of lovers on opposite sides of the war. But as I read on, I realized that there were many forms of love expressed through the various characters, with perhaps the most powerful being the enduring bond of friendship.

With a staunch commitment to each other, the Society members demonstrate an unshakable alliance, evocatively revealed through acts of devotion and sacrifice.