10 books like City of Thieves

I’ve chosen this book not just for the incredible picture it paints of German occupation, but for the story of its survival. Irène Némirovsky was a Ukrainian-Jewish author living in Paris with her young family until she was denied French citizenship and forced to flee to the French countryside. In July 1942 she was arrested during a period of vicious roundups by the Germans and transported to Auschwitz, where she died a month later from typhus. Irène’s two daughters were amongst the crowd that gathered daily outside the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, where returnees from concentration camps were processed after the liberation of France. Her daughter Denise kept the notebook containing Suite Française for fifty years before realising what it contained, and Irène’s masterpiece was finally published in 2004.

Set during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Doerr’s stunningly lyrical novel tells the story of twelve-year-old Marie-Laure Leblanc and her father, Daniel, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Father and daughter flee Paris for the walled coastal city of Saint Malo, where they take refuge with a relative.

Doerr weaves a gorgeous story of survival during calamitous times that is particularly poignant when it comes to Daniel’s relationship with his daughter. Having been blind since her childhood, one of the ways Daniel keeps Marie-Laure safe is by constructing model replicas of their surroundings so she can navigate her neighborhood while sightless – what a beautiful testament to the love and resourcefulness of a parent for his child.

Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, this story of a newly-married couple overseeing the construction of their dream home is as clean-cut, luminous and full of hints of fragility as the building itself – a modernist cube of glass. The husband is rich, the wife excited by her new role as patron.  Their architect -  a sharply observed portrayal of a tetchy artist who will insist on sticking to his vision regardless of his clients’ doubts – wants to make them a masterpiece, and he does.  But the husband is Jewish.  We are in the 1930s.  Glass walls are not going to keep them safe. 

In lucid, elegant prose Mawer conjures up central European culture in those edgy, febrile years when artistic and intellectual energy were so vital, and politics were so deadly.

What I appreciate about Hunter's novel is that it takes a new approach to the subject of the Holocaust. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kurcs, a Polish-Jewish family, find themselves driven into another diaspora, with their family members cast to the four corners of the globe. Hunter touches on the plight of Poland during the early years of the war when the country was torn asunder by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. The plot follows the various family members as they struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland, in Stalin's Gulag, and as one member tries to flee to South America. A big, sprawling, family epic filled with tragedy and humanity, brutality and heroism.

It seems as if I’m consistently selecting novels set during war. But my former recommendation, and this one, is just too good to pass by plus it’s on the top shelf of my library, keeping other favorites company. This one is a love story between boyhood friends and I’m a hopeless romantic. Match my romantic soul with tragedy and I’m a goner. Now we’re in Afghanistan where a privileged young boy and his friend, the son of his father’s servant, live through their country’s revolution and are invaded by Russian forces that tear the country apart. The writing is so powerful and eloquent, the subject so timely (it was published in 2003), that I was spellbound by Khaled Hosseini’s literary genius.

This is a novel overflowing with mysterious overtones. Its tidal surge licks at the reader’s heels and lures us in. The story is told by Piranesi, who inhabits a place he calls the House. The House is composed of a series of vast rooms populated with marble statues, and, on the lower floor, an ocean is imprisoned. We are tasked with unraveling the world that guileless Piranesi inhabits. We don’t know how long he has lived there and neither does he. He has devised his own calendar system and tries to number the vast rooms of the House but we sense there is a lot he is misinterpreting. Why do I love this book? It sets out a trail of clues that eventually make sense of Piranesi’s nonsensical world. It is a puzzle to solve constructed of splendid images and doesn’t every mystery reader crave a juicy puzzle?

I’m a Steinbeck fan. Why? Because he wrote about California like few other writers. His sweeping descriptions of the land leave me breathless and the characters with their fatal flaws and aching humanity burn into my soul. Over the top? You bet! Working Days, his personal journals of The Grapes of Wrath, is a treasure for writers and lovers of fiction. It’s no wonder that many of his novels were adapted for the big screen. Who can forget James Dean as Cal Trask in East of Eden?

I’m always intrigued by novels set in places I’ve visited. In the ’60s, I first traveled to Greece and then in 2017, my husband and I spent a month there. And if you haven’t visited The Henry Ford Museum of Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, don’t miss it. This novel had me on two counts. It’s the startling story of a Greek American family told through the eyes of a young girl who is becoming a woman. The family lands in Detroit as it becomes the automotive capital of the world and then collapses during the ’60s race riots. The rich cultural heritage of Greece unfolds and a secret is revealed about a genetic mutation that changes the principal character from a girl into boy. Hold your hat! It won a Pulitzer, too.

Hazel Micaellef, 62, a police officer in a small town in Ontario, is divorced, overweight, has back problems, and drinks too much. I am from a small town and divorced. Liquor is not my vice. I am, however, completely at home in the fictional and slightly seedy Port Dumas where locals have long memories. When human bones are found on land that formerly housed orphans, many of the town’s ugly secrets bubble up. The plot is complex and the setting immersive. I would not necessarily want to live in a place like Port Dumas…but I have.

This is the last Bernie Gunther novel, in a series that is über noir, and whose protagonist is a police detective who is a member of the SS in Nazi Germany. 

In Metropolis, Gunther learns that murder has become the subject of an art movement, Lustmord, or “lust murders” which focused on the brutal, sexual-tinged serial killings of women and prostitutes in 1930s Berlin.

A scene in the book of a famous German expressionist sketching a murder victim in the morgue is all the more chilling, since I know it to be true. I’ve been fascinated with the art movements of this era, and have seen the exhibits of Lustmord paintings, which are still in museums today.