Here are 100 books that Heroes of the Secret Underground fans have personally recommended if you like
Heroes of the Secret Underground.
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I was 12 years old when, in Amsterdam on a family holiday, I was taken to see the Anne Frank House. Until then I knew very little about WW2, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. After viewing the ‘secret annexe’ my father bought me The Diary of Anne Frank, which was on sale there, and I started reading it in the car as we drove off. The book sparked my deep lifelong interest in that chapter of history. Many years later I discovered that my own mother also had an extraordinary wartime story. By then I was a journalist and knew I’d have to write a book about it—Deadly Carousel.
For me (and not just because my family is Hungarian), Wallenberg’s story is the most heart-wrenching of all accounts of Holocaust heroism. He was the Swedish diplomat in Nazi-occupied Budapest who worked tirelessly to save Jewish lives, despite death threats to himself. He issued thousands of Swedish protection documents and set up Jewish safe-houses. One incident particularly brings a lump to my throat. Hearing of a death march of Jewish deportees, he drove to the Hungarian border to head it off. Clutching a bunch of Swedish passports, he ordered the Arrow Cross guards (Hungarian fascists) to stand aside whilst he searched for the Jews entitled to them. The suspicious guards surrounded him with pointed bayonets, but he shouted above their heads that he had passes for anyone who had ‘lost’ them. Hands were raised throughout the crowd. Wallenberg was so convincing that the SS officer in charge finally relented. The…
The story of Raoul Wallenberg - the Swedish businessman who, at immense personal risk, rescued many of Budapest's Jews from the Holocaust and subsequently disappeared into the Soviet prison system - is one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II. Yet the complete story of his life and fate can only be told now - and for the first time in this book - following access to the Russian and Swedish archival sources, previously not used. Born into a wealthy Swedish family, Wallenberg was a moderately successful businessman when he was recruited by the War Refugee Board to…
I am a writer, a hypnotherapist, and a consciousness researcher. Ever since I was a baby, I had the memory and the sense that there was more to our existence than meets the eye. Even though I started my career as a lawyer in Vienna, Austria, after a transformative illness and a series of spiritually awakening experiences, I left for Mexico to pursue my calling as a metaphysical explorer and writer. Ever since, I’ve spent my life mapping out various dimensions of the psyche. When I’m not traveling, I like to retreat into my small highland cottage with Marius, the border collie, and Kasiopea, the black magic cat.
With this Hungarian author, I share the same birthday, as well as our mystical philosophy on life. Her book is an epic alchemical tale spanning centuries that describes the evolution of consciousness through subsequent incarnations from one life to the next.
I find not only the book itself fascinating but also the story of how it came into being. The author began to write it in a bomb shelter during WWII. Afterward, the Communists banned it and burned it, yet a few copies were miraculously rescued and hand-copied during dictatorial times.
Today, the book enjoys cult status in its homeland of Hungary. Unfortunately, the English translation is currently out of print, but if you can lay your hands on a version you can read, don’t miss out on this masterpiece.
Conceived amidst the horrors and hellfire of the Second World War, Mria Szepes' novel about a man's search for the Elixir of Life offered a glimpse of hope at a time of con-flagration. By giving a broad cosmic perspective to the events touching the lives of everyone in Europe in those years, she put human existence in a broader scale extending beyond daily life and put forth a reason for existence within the entirety of the Universe. After the war this remarkable book was published in Budapest but was soon banned by the government. Following decades of hibernation, like the…
I’m a voracious reader, an author, and also a book critic, so hundreds of books cross my desk. What I love the most is the feeling of discovery—reading a book whose likes I haven’t seen on any bestseller list or on a front display in a bookstore. There are so many, many hidden gems—books that have stayed with me long after the publication day, and I always want others to have the same devotion to them that I do!
Strangers in Budapest is exotic, gorgeous, and like a beautiful orchestra on paper. It also keeps you turning the pages.
A young American couple move here with their baby son after the fall of the Communists, but they bring their ghosts with them, and assimilating is difficult. especially when they encounter an elderly Jewish-American veteran, who has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced married and then murdered his daughter. Just dazzlingly original.
"Jessica Keener has written a gorgeous, lyrical, and sweeping novel about the tangled web of past and present. Suspenseful, perceptive, fast-paced, and ultimately restorative." -Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue Budapest: gorgeous city of secrets, with ties to a shadowy, bloody past. It is to this enigmatic European capital that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move from Boston with their infant son shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. For Annie, it is an effort to escape the ghosts that haunt her past, and Will wants simply to seize the chance to build a new…
I’m the author of multiple middle grade and YA historical novels, including Torch, which won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Torch takes place in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and it is especially timely in the face of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Bear (a popular symbol of the Russian Empire) has mauled many of its neighbors in the past century, not only Czechoslovakia and Ukraine but also the Baltic countries that, like Ukraine, were incorporated into the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism in 1989.
For those who like their history infused with magic, this historical fantasy set in Hungary in 1956 introduces Jewish folklore and history along with the lives of Hungarians fighting for their freedom.
Csilla and her aunt have tickets out of the country, but news about her parents—executed by the previous Soviet-backed regime—along with the student uprising and two beautiful and mysterious strangers compel her to stay despite the specter of a bloody Soviet invasion.
A tumultuous tale of the student-led 1956 Hungarian revolution—and an all too timely look at the impact of Communism and the USSR in Eastern Europe—set in a fabulist, colorless post-WWII Budapest from Sydney Taylor Honor winner Katherine Locke.
“A haunting, beautiful read that centers queer Jewish characters.” —BuzzFeed
In the middle of Budapest, there is a river. Csilla knows the river is magic. During WWII, the river kept her family safe when they needed it most--safe from the Holocaust. But that was before the Communists seized power. Before her parents were murdered by the Soviet police. Before Csilla knew things…
The idea for my first novel came from a 1946 study of Alabama parolees, linking individual characteristics to the likelihood of recidivism. The outcomes were surprising in many instances: “promising factors” such as education, profession, and intelligence didn’t correlate with good behavior. This got me thinking about the lasting effectsof imprisonment. Sentences don’t necessarily end when an inmate walks out the prison door. I see this again and again in the previously incarcerated students I teach at Helena College—they’ve been released from an institution, but mental and physical imprisonment lingers, and sometimes grows. The books on this list don’t shy away from that hard reality.
Szabó is another of my all-time favorite authors, and I return to her books again and again. Katalin Street explores the devastating effects of Germany’s occupation of Budapest upon three different, neighboring families. Characters are imprisoned in a variety of ways: Bálint serves time in a prison camp; the Elekes family serves time in the small apartment to which they’re moved during the occupation; everyone serves time in the prison of their memories, including the ghost of sweet Henriette, who haunts the narrative.
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE DOOR, ONE OF NYTBR'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2015
** WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE **
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE WARWICK WOMEN IN TRANSLATION PRIZE 2019 **
"Extraordinary" New York Times
"Quite unforgettable" Daily Telegraph
"Unusual, piercing . . . oddly percipient" Irish Times
"A gorgeous elegy" Publishers Weekly
"A brightly shining star in the Szabo universe" World Literature Today
In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Balint, the promising son of the…
"Why don’t they want to have their own country?” I asked this question as I was 12 years old and we were watching the results of the Quebec independence referendums coming in. The Quebecois nationalists had lost- and lost big. And I wanted to know why. I grew up in a political family but none of the adults were able to give me an answer. So, I began to do research on my own. Being a bit of an obsessive, my interest in referendums took me to Oxford University, and as a professor I have specialised in direct democracy. I have advised the US State Department and the British Foreign Office on referendums around the world – and written several books on democracy.
While the cover only lists John Stuart as the author, he acknowledged in his autobiography that the book was “directly and literally our joint production” with his wife Harriet. And certainly, the book has a different tone than ‘his’ other works; less academic, and more lively. Anyway, what they wanted to show was that the “only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.” This is so relevant today when autocrats from Beijing, through Moscow, to Budapest are muzzling voices with different degrees of severity. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. And the evidence shows that dictators and despots are fallible. Democracy works. Dictatorship does not.…
Discussed and debated from time immemorial, the concept of personal liberty went without codification until the 1859 publication of On Liberty. John Stuart Mill's complete and resolute dedication to the cause of freedom inspired this treatise, an enduring work through which the concept remains well known and studied. The British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist's argument does not focus on "the so-called Liberty of the Will…but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Mill asks and answers provocative questions relating to the boundaries of social authority…
For many years, I’ve been creating visual nonfiction books for adults. These books are about climate change, indigenous sovereignty, and nuclear physics—not typical kids’ book fare. But because my books include artwork, everyone always asked me when I would write and illustrate a book for children. Once I had my own children, I was suddenly full of ideas. Children’s books are often underestimated. The best books of the genre are accessible enough to interest a young person, sophisticated enough to engage the adults reading them aloud, and multidimensional enough to reward countless re-readings. I believe books that meet this standard fit alongside civilization’s great works of literature.
I never tire of reading this brilliant book to my son. His imagination (and mine) goes to new places with each rereading. Each spread relocates the reader to another corner of the world, where we glimpse a snapshot of action: someone honks their car horn in a traffic jam in Mexico City, a volcano erupts in Papua-New Guinea, a woman drops a mysterious envelope on the sidewalk in Budapest.
For my son and I, the book has been as interactive as any game, offering endless possibilities for discussion and debate. Because each spread is a single moment, we can dream up our own interpretation of what might have led to this scene and what will unfold afterward. It’s wonderful to see wildly varied landscapes as we travel the planet.
Inspired by the question, "What are they doing right at this moment on the other side of the world?" this book focuses on natural and human events happening all over the world in the same second. Talking about the world and how it's so different in places but also so similar and shared, so incredible and surprising, the books takes us to New York, Chicago, Mexico, Portugal, Angola, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungry, Brazil, and South Africa, among others.
So, while you sit turning the pages of this book, things are happening everywhere. Somewhere, a wave is reaching the shore. Elsewhere,…
I have been writing novels for many years now about the social history of Birmingham and the West Midlands and often find myself writing about World War Two. It’s the history of most families in this country. But I also grew up—unusually for my generation—with parents who were active adults in the war, my father in the army in North Africa and Italy, my mother in a factory that had gone over to munitions in Coventry. So the war felt very present as they talked about it a lot. Only later I grew to understand what it means to people and explored the history for myself.
I read this story in my teens and as a result, spent years wanting to join the navy. (That did wear off!) Having read it again recently, it seems a much darker story than I had remembered. But the mystery at its heart won’t let you go. Nevil Shute was a great storyteller and like many writers of his generation had many experiences to draw on. The story is quite slow-moving, but poignant—heartbreaking in fact. Gradually, he unfolds the mystery of Jessie Proctor, an Englishwoman working for a family in Australia. It begins with Jessie’s suicide and we uncover the events that have haunted this young, ex-servicewoman’s life. As Shute says, "a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over."
The mysterious death of a young woman on an Australian farm reveals a bittersweet story of doomed wartime romance amidst a family crisis.
Alan Duncan returns to his family home in Australia after the war and several years of study in England. But his homecoming is marred by the mysterious suicide of his parents' quiet and reliable parlour-maid. A search through her belongings in search of clues leads to heartbreaking revelations about the woman's identity, the death of Alan's brother Bill and, above all, the disappearance of his brother's fiancee, Janet.
I’m an author from New Zealand, and I’ve always been drawn to the personal stories from WWII. I am interested in the moral and ethical decisions made by ordinary people in those extraordinary times. I often wonder if I would have made the right choices in the same situation. I gravitate towards reading books about the Second World War, especially books that include previously unknown information, view the war from a different angle, or offer a new insight. I’ve been fortunate to travel the world with my career, and my novel, The Paris of the East was inspired after visiting Poland on an author tour. I’ve also written other novels, non-fiction books, and children’s books.
This novel is based on a true wartime story kept secret for more than seventy years. The story is set in March 1942, Townsville, Australia, after Singapore has fallen and Darwin has been bombed. The small town is transformed into a hub for 70,000 soldiers. But Australian troops begrudge the confident American soldiers, and there is growing conflict within the American ranks, and racial tensions are exposed. This compelling read is made even more poignant when you discover that it’s based on a mutiny that was covered up by the military. Khaki Town is a thought-provoking novel that will have you rallying against the injustices it exposes.
I'm a Frenchman with a great interest in the history of the Second World War, specializing in the correspondence of Allied soldiers. Almost 20 years of collecting WWII letters led to the publication of my first book Till Victory which was an award-winning bestseller in France, before it was released in English worldwide in 2021. I also host a podcast (Till Victory: a podcast about WWII and Peace), where I interview British and American veterans, and have made documentaries such as Red Beret & Dark Chocolate or The Missing Highlander. It's all about trying to understand what the young men who fought and died to liberate my country went through when they were my age.
Finally, a book with WWII letters that doesn’t focus exclusively on the British or Americans! Some of the soldiers are also from Australia, New Zealand, and even Germany! It helps to have a broader view of the conflict and it is very interesting to observe the differences in points of view. Moreover, this book provides the reader with beautiful photos of the letter writers, in addition to their names and stories before and after the war. Unfortunately, there is little or no historical context surrounding each letter, which is not disturbing when one is already familiar with the subject but is essential to understand all their subtleties.
Writers from 20 Allied and Axis countries are gathered in this unique collection of letters from service-men and women to their friends, families and sweethearts. WORLD WAR II LETTERS provides an unflinching perspective on the lives of those who served throughout the world - in Europe, the Pacific, Northern Africa and Asia. Wide-ranging in scope, WORLD WAR II LETTERS includes writings by officers and infantry, nurses and doctors, pilots, POWs, those injured in action, killed in combat, and those reported missing. Introductory biographies and photographs vividly capture military life before, during and after the war.
