Here are 100 books that Ruth Maier's Diary fans have personally recommended if you like
Ruth Maier's Diary.
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Storytelling wields the power to transcend time and place, connecting us through shared experiences and emotions. It shapes our understanding of the world and ignites the imagination, making it an essential part of the human journey. As a psychologist, I understand how the stories we tell about ourselves are crucial in defining who we are and that books and good people can help shape our character. The books I've chosen celebrate the human spirit and our ability to face adversity, adapt, and ultimately choose our destiny. As Stephen Covey wisely stated, “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.”
This book by Markus Zusak is frequently named one of the best WW2 books. I like it because it’s a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of hope in dark times. It’s a haunting and beautifully written novel set in Nazi Germany.
Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel, a young girl sent to live with a foster family. As she navigates a tumultuous world filled with fear and cruelty, Liesel finds comfort in books and words. I loved the premise of stealing forbidden books and sharing their stories with others. Through Liesel’s experiences, I explored the themes of love, loss, and the power of storytelling in the face of adversity.
'Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner' Guardian 'Brilliant and hugely ambitious' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Telegraph ___
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
I became very interested in this topic when I moved to Italy and met and married Andrea Meloni. I had never been particularly interested in wars and battles but, when he began to tell me about his very personal experience growing up in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, I was captivated and felt that his unique story was important. I, therefore, encouraged him to write his memoirs. My book is based on them, and so it is more his book than mine. However, I did extensive research to set his story in a coherent historical context.
Origo was an English woman married to a wealthy Italian.
They were living on their estate in Italy (Tuscany) when Mussolini came to power and soon allied himself with Hitler. Her personal account of how they, both anti-Fascists, lived during this very difficult period brings history to life. They often put themselves in harm’s way by helping others hide from Fascist pursuers.
The bestselling diaries of WWII in Tuscany, with a new introduction by writer and social historian Virginia Nicholson, and stunning rediscovered photographsAt the height of the Second World War, Italy was being torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the eventual Allied invasion. In a corner of Tuscany, one woman - born in England, married to an Italian - kept a record of daily life in a country at war. Iris Origo's compellingly powerful diary, War in Val d'Orcia, is the spare and vivid account of what happened when a peaceful farming valley became a battleground.
I became very interested in this topic when I moved to Italy and met and married Andrea Meloni. I had never been particularly interested in wars and battles but, when he began to tell me about his very personal experience growing up in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, I was captivated and felt that his unique story was important. I, therefore, encouraged him to write his memoirs. My book is based on them, and so it is more his book than mine. However, I did extensive research to set his story in a coherent historical context.
Oakley is a master at writing historical fiction. This novel takes place in Norway during the Nazi occupation.
Based on her thorough study of documents and extensive interviews with relevant individuals in Norway, she has created characters who are patriots (jøssing), characters who go over to the German side and are as cruel as if not crueler than the Nazis, and characters who try to appear neutral so as not to put themselves or their families in harm’s way.
The protagonist is the leader of a vast resistance network in Norway with strong ties to the British military. The fear is palpable. The reader is in constant dread that the jøssings will be caught, tortured, and killed.
British-trained Norwegian intelligence agent, Tore Haugland, is a jøssing—a patriot—sent to a fishing village on Norway’s west coast to set up a line to receive weapons and agents from England via the “Shetland Bus.” Posing as a deaf fisherman, his mission is complicated when he falls in love with Anna Fromme, a German widow. Accused of betraying her husband, she has a young daughter and secrets of her own. Although the Allies have liberated France, the most zealous Nazis hang on in Norway, sending out agents to disembowel resistance groups. If Haugland fails, it could cost him his life and…
I became very interested in this topic when I moved to Italy and met and married Andrea Meloni. I had never been particularly interested in wars and battles but, when he began to tell me about his very personal experience growing up in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, I was captivated and felt that his unique story was important. I, therefore, encouraged him to write his memoirs. My book is based on them, and so it is more his book than mine. However, I did extensive research to set his story in a coherent historical context.
Steinbeck wrote this novel about a country occupied by the Nazis during World War II.
Although the name of this country is never mentioned, it was generally acknowledged that it was Norway. The focus is on one particular town and shows what life is like when you are not free and live in constant fear.
This book found its way to Europe and was translated into European languages and widely distributed clandestinely. It served to encourage occupied countries to rebel against their oppressor.
Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside—and betrayal born within the close-knit community
A Penguin Classic
In this masterful tale set in Norway during World War II, Steinbeck explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. As he delves into the emotions of the German commander and the Norwegian traitor, and depicts the spirited patriotism of the Norwegian underground, Steinbeck uncovers profound, often unsettling truths about war—and about human nature.
Nobel Prize winner JohnSteinbeck’s self-described “celebration of the durability of democracy” had an extraordinary impact as Allied…
I love writing and illustrating all sorts of children's stories. The only thing my stories have in common is that none of their heroes eat meat, drink milk, or take part in the egg and spoon race. I write the kind of stories I want to read. I don't want to read about sex or violence. And I don't want to read foul language. I want something meaningful, something with a concluding note of optimism. Consequently, well-written children's stories often appeal to me. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that these are not just children's stories, they're good stories that anyone can enjoy.
Thea's Christmas visit to her estranged father and his new family in Norway is disappointing and infuriating, until she meets the bear. In this fiction, Sarah Lean conveys so much truth. Her beautiful, mistreated, hungry, lonely bear is so real, he brings tears to my eyes. Thea tries desperately to protect her new best friend from the locals who consider him a threat, because she knows “They would not take the time to look into his eyes, to question and discover what he was really like." I wish everyone would take the time to look into animals' eyes, to see who they really are, and let them be.
A story of friendship to treasure this Christmas . . .
From the bestselling author of A DOG CALLED HOMELESS, this is the perfect Christmas gift for fans of Michael Morpurgo, Lauren St John and Sara Pennypacker's PAX.
It's the Christmas holidays and Thea is looking forward to spending them with her father. She can tell him all about her plans to become a writer, and maybe he'll buy her the typewriter she's been dreaming of.
But when Thea arrives in snowy Norway, everything feels . . . wrong. Her father is as distant as ever and now she has…
I’ve been a full-time writer since 1994 and have so far published twenty-seven books, three of them with gay themes: My Father’s Scar, a gay coming-of-age novel and two about LGBTQ+ issues: Top 250 LGTBQ Books for Teens and The Heart Has Its Reasons, a history of queer literature. I’ve been interested in this literature since I was a gay teen myself, because there were no YA books with queer characters then. I missed seeing my face in the pages of a good book and so I promised myself that when I became an adult. I would make sure there was an ample assortment for today’s queer kids. And, guess what? I’ve kept my promise!
Weary of people asking him what his plans for the future are, eighteen-year-old Dutch teen Tycho decides to travel from his Holland home to America to work at a camp for international kids. Along the way, he meets Oliver, who’s from Norway, and is also going to work at the camp. The two quickly become fast friends and then something more. When their love relationship is discovered, they’re expelled from the camp, and the two fly back to Norway where Tycho will stay with Oliver while the boy’s mother is gone. No, there are no wild parties, just a lovely examination of an emerging relationship that is challenged by Oliver’s keeping a closely guarded secret. If this sounds dull, trust me, it isn’t! Find out why I’m so crazy about this book by reading it. Tell them Michael sent you...
Tycho Zeling is drifting through his life. Everything in it - school, friends, girls, plans for the future - just kind of ... happens. Like a movie he presses play on, but doesn't direct.
So Tycho decides to break away from everything. He flies to America to spend his summer as a counselor at a summer camp, for international kids. It is there that Oliver walks in, another counselor, from Norway.
And it is there that Tycho feels his life stop, and begin again, finally, as his. The Days of Bluegrass Love was originally published in the Netherlands in 1999.…
I am eternally fascinated by the way in which a string of words can take on a life of its own. With a mere 26 letters, a good writer can have a reader believe anything. When realist fiction first became a category in the 18th century in England, there was a lot of handwringing over whether readers were being lied to. Of course, they were! That is the point of fiction. My own work has always played with the boundary of realist fiction, fairytale, and truth. I’m interested in the way a story can make meaning—and the more hijinks, the better!
I set out very determined to despise this first book of Knausgard’s series. Knausgard’s life is no more fascinating than anyone’s. This is not necessarily his life but some reasonable facsimile that dips in and out of reverie, philosophy, and the hardcore reality of cleaning up after an alcoholic parent dies. Hoarding, self-loathing, and Nordic landscape are all features. I mean, what is NOT to love about that?
My lust for this book is not so much what it is about, though, as how it does this thing of drawing me along in its unadorned vocabulary to wholesale belief in everything that is put down. It is a supreme hoax that I am grateful to have encountered.
A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues—death, love, art, fear—and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.
In my third novel, Great Circle, a fictional aviator named Marian Graves disappears while trying to fly around the world north-south in 1950. While researching and writing, I became a travel journalist, partly so I could follow my character into far-flung, rugged corners of the world. Traveling, I encountered people who lead truly adventurous lives, and I started to seek out riskier experiences myself. I swam with humpback whales, tracked snow leopards in the Himalayas, and journeyed across huge seas to Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. I still don’t consider myself a full-fledged adventurer, but I love reading about women contending with the challenges of wild places and their own internal landscapes.
I love cold, northern places and dogs, and, if you haven’t already noticed, warts-and-all stories about women finding strength they didn’t know they had in the wilderness. Blair Braverman’s memoir checks all these boxes. As a teenager, she goes to a folk school in the Norwegian Arctic and learns to work with sled dogs, something she later continues as a guide in Alaska. (Braverman is now a professional musher and has run the Iditarod.) The book’s subtitle is Chasing Fear and Finding Home In the Great White North, and Braverman is unsparing in her exploration of fear rooted in both the human and natural world. I read this book on a series of airplanes in one long travel day, and I’m still reminded of it every time I see Braverman’s delightful Twitter stories about her dogs.
A rich and revelatory memoir of a young woman reclaiming her courage in the stark landscapes of the north.
By the time Blair Braverman was eighteen, she had left her home in California, moved to arctic Norway to learn to drive sled dogs, and found work as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. Determined to carve out a life as a “tough girl”—a young woman who confronts danger without apology—she slowly developed the strength and resilience the landscape demanded of her.
By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube brilliantly recounts Braverman’s…
I am a trained historian and past educator at a historical museum. I fell into my passion for Norway during WWII after I dreamed about a man in the snow surrounded by German soldiers. I was encouraged to write the scene down. That scene became the prologue to The Jøssing Affair, but not before going to libraries and reading countless secondary and primary resources, interviewing numbers of Norwegian-Americans who settled in my area in the 1950s, and eating a lot of lefse. This passion of over 28 years has taken me to Norway to walk Trondheim where my novels take place and forge friendships with local historians and experts.
Occupiedis a fictionalized story of the author’s father, Trygve Borstad, during WWII. I recommend this book because I think the novel gives a realistic portrayal of ordinary life in occupied Norway as he tells the story of his family and their struggles to survive during the German occupation of their country. Trygve was only 7 years old in 1936 when he was living with his grandparents in Norway. His father had gone back to the States to find a place for the family to live and raise money for their passage for them to travel. Ten years will pass until he will see his father again. As he grows into a teenager, he is entrusted with a job that will protect a resistance group in the town.
A world at war, a family kept apart and a young boy in the midst of it all. Will they all survive? As WW II breaks out, a father finds himself in the U.S. while his wife and sons are home in occupied Norway. Based on the son’s true-life journals from 1935-1945, this is the story of a family separated by war and uncertainty.
I am a trained historian and past educator at a historical museum. I fell into my passion for Norway during WWII after I dreamed about a man in the snow surrounded by German soldiers. I was encouraged to write the scene down. That scene became the prologue to The Jøssing Affair, but not before going to libraries and reading countless secondary and primary resources, interviewing numbers of Norwegian-Americans who settled in my area in the 1950s, and eating a lot of lefse. This passion of over 28 years has taken me to Norway to walk Trondheim where my novels take place and forge friendships with local historians and experts.
The German invasion of Norway was sudden and thorough, capturing major ports from Oslo to Bergen and Trondheim on a single day in April. Their only failure was not capturing King Haakon, the cabinet, and Norway’s gold bullion. Robert Pearson’s Gold Run is a thrilling account of the efforts of “a visionary bank chief,” loyal Norwegians, and ships and men of the British Royal Navy. While under bombardment, immense courage was displayed as 50 tons of gold were moved by road, rail, and fishing boats. Pearson provides documents, photos, and personal accounts as well as a great narrative. If you don’t know anything about Norway during WWII, this book is a great way to understand the history of the invasion, how it unfolded and what was at stake.
Gold Run is the true story of arguably one of the greatest gold snatches in history. It is a tale of immense bravery, endurance and great leadership of loyal Norwegians, plus a little good fortune and help from the British against intrigue and overwhelming odds. The German invasion of Norway on the night of April 8th/9th, 1940 almost took Norway completely unawares; had it not been for the defiance of one small coastal battery, the Norwegian royal family, government, and nearly 50 tons of gold bullion would have had no chance of escape. In desperate haste the royal family fled…
