Here are 100 books that Schindler's List fans have personally recommended if you like
Schindler's List.
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I am a teacher, a college professor, and a lifetime reader. I came from a small town, went to college to study writing, ended up getting graduate degrees in theatre, became a theatre director, and then went back to my first love, writing. Throughout my childhood, I bonded with my siblings, and we often feared our mother, who was a fascinating creature but often rough on us. She expected perfection and wasn’t in tune with her childhood. So even then, stories of children in danger—abandoned or scolded or shamed—have resonated with me.
I could not stop reading this book—and when the TV series came out, I fell in love all over again. A trapped, imprisoned aristocrat who is elegant and only slightly snotty and who has a bedrock of humanity underneath any stiffness and propriety—that’s the protagonist, Rostov.
This novel features not one but two abandoned children, and, in both cases, their plights bring out the best in Count Rostov. He is naturally kind, but he also finds resources and courage he never knew he had. I’ve experienced the book three times—reading, listening to an audiobook, and watching the TV series and I was in love every time.
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and…
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
I can’t understand why this book isn’t better known. It is an actual diary that survived by chance. It was written by a young woman of twenty-one from a wealthy Jewish family long-established in France and not thinking of themselves as anything but French. I found it gripping and harrowing, all the more so because when the Nazis conquer France and start to impose restrictions on Jews, Hélène cannot grasp what is happening or what lies ahead. She has had a happy, secure life, but now these hideous indignities are being imposed on her.
When she is forced to wear the yellow star, she is horrified by the jeers and insults directed at her in the streets by passers-by whom she has always thought of as fellow citizens. The diary brings home, like almost nothing else I’ve read, the way in which the ordinary life of the intended victims turned…
Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.
On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about…
As the daughter of a prim and proper New England family, expectations were that I would follow societal norms: attend college, get married, and raise a family. I knew practically nothing about the world outside the United States, nor had I any curiosity about it. Everything changed in 1980 when I took a job as an accountant working for one of the world’s greatest adventurers, Richard Bangs. He literally dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the remotest heart of Africa, where I became infected by wanderlust. Ever since, as a single woman, I have embraced a life of adventure traveling around our amazing planet.
This story also tells of a river journey by four young orphans who in 1932 escape from a horrid Indian training school and travel for months down the Mississippi River. They head into the unknown, unprotected from the perils they encounter.
On my journey, I needed to be constantly vigilant for natural predators like lions, hippos, and crocs. These children had to be on the lookout for human predators: the search party sent looking for them, drifters, grifters, and traveling faith healers. Facing each obstacle we encountered on our trips, we managed not only to survive but actually thrive in hostile surroundings.
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others…
I’ve written some dozen books. After publishing the first 10, I realized I love to write about young people just finding out who they are and what’s important to them. I love to look back at that impressionable age and watch it unfold. So my last two books were YA—one set at a Quaker prep school and the other set in a dystopian city-state where teenage boys could be killed when they turn eighteen, and teenage girls could be used for sexual exploitation and discarded as easily as old milk cartons. Those troubled, tumultuous, anything-can-happen hovering adulthood years from about fifteen to twenty-one fascinate me and inspire my writing.
Where to start? I’d read The Secret History and found it mesmerizing, but I loved this book more. It was more personal, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
I loved the premise and the relationships between the characters, even though they were completely flawed. I bought into everything they did and thought and wondered what I would have done in the same circumstances and conditions. The writing is extraordinary, and anyone who loves to read prose that sings will adore this book as I did.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the…
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This powerful story angered many when it was published, but Styron is asking serious questions: How do you survive a terrible experience, especially one that forces you to make an agonizing choice? Can you, in fact, survive that? He takes what I believe is the most extreme case of survivor guilt imaginable, which is the heart-rending decision that Sophie is forced to make and which is the core of the novel.
That’s in the past–the recent past for the characters–and in the present, the three main people in the novel find themselves in a painful love triangle that arises specifically from those terrible events but which I found to be a very perceptive insight into a situation that many of us find ourselves in.
It’s about a different kind of choice but one which will cause pain, whatever is decided.
In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.
I was a military spouse for 26 years. My husband was stationed at MCAS Cherry Point NC and MCB Camp Lejeune NC, both for two years. We (he and I and our four children) lived on the base. He also served two tours in Vietnam, just like Doreen’s husband, and also at Headquarters, Marine Corps later. The fictional Marine base and town where this takes place is modeled after Camp Lejeune and the adjacent town. I did see the same sign welcoming us to Klan country, on Easter Sunday morning 1972 and have never forgotten it. I also knew Queenie’s counterpart. This novel is in no way autobiographical—I was never as brave as Doreen.
Mudbound is about post-WWII in the Jim Crow south. It tells the stories of two returning soldiers in a muddy farm setting. I was raised on a dairy farm with plenty of mud, so I easily identified with the setting. The situation of the two men, one White, one Black, and their families' struggles, physically with the constant mud, and emotionally with the politics of both the era and the place, were graphic. It was a book that was difficult to put down and also difficult to read. In ways I was reminded of 12 Years A Slave.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CAREY MULLIGAN, GARRETT HEDLUND & MARY J. BLIGE
When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This is a vivid and gripping true account of how a brilliant Polish Jewish pianist survived by a fluke the Nazi mass-murder of Warsaw’s Jews in which his parents and three siblings died. The author hid in the ruins of Warsaw through two winters without heating and eating only scraps of food he managed to scavenge. Near death, he was, almost unbelievably, found and helped by a German SS officer who had heard him playing a battered piano.
The book shows humanity at both its worst and its best. The film by Roman Polanski is brilliant, but this memoir is even more powerful.
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film.
'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday
'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This novel shocked and even horrified me at first with its graphic description of a woman’s sexual fantasies. What has this to do with the horrors that are to follow? What is the relevance to the Holocaust of Freud’s attempt to treat this disturbed woman? The novel created huge controversy on its publication, and it took me several readings to understand what the author was suggesting–at least, what I think he meant because nothing is spelled out for the reader.
This is the heartbreaking story of a young woman and her small son caught up in the horror of what the Nazis did in Ukraine, and what I think D. M. Thomas is doing in the most inventive and daring manner is to show how deeply embedded in the psyche of Europe is the wickedness, the psychological sickness, that led to the Holocaust. I’m usually uneasy with the supernatural in…
The worldwide bestselling, Booker-shortlisted modern classic
Now a BBC radio play starring Anne-Marie Duff and Bill Paterson, dramatised by Dennis Potter.
'Spine-tingling... heart-stunning' New York Times
'A novel of blazing imaginative and intellectual force' Salman Rushdie
'This novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze' Time
'Precise, troubling, brilliant' Observer
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The White Hotel is a modern classic of searing eroticism and sensuality set against the broad sweep of twentieth-century history.
It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying…
When I was six years old, my Dutch relatives visited. Stories swirled about their bravery in getting secrets from the Germans and sharing the intel with the Allies, about their privation during the hunger winter, and their work hiding their Jewish countrymen. I studied abroad in 1977-1978 and took the opportunity to visit my Dutch relatives. They told me more stories of their resistance work, their escapades, and, most importantly, their “why” during my time with them. Such stories don’t leave you–ever. They percolated in my head for years until a voice came to me, Rika’s voice, and I began to write. Sixty Blades of Grass is the result.
This book brought me to boots on the ground as it supplied me with a first-hand account of life in The Netherlands during WWII. I loved every word.
Diet Eman resists the German occupation by moving her beloved Jewish friends and forged documents, at great danger to herself. Sustained by her faith, hatred of the Germans, love for The Netherlands, and her love for her fiancé, Hein, she works until her capture by the Germans.
Passionate, true, loving, suspenseful, and honest, this is a must-read for those who need to know more about the war in Holland.
Things We Couldn't Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman, who, with her fiance, Hein Sietsma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II. Throughout the years that Diet and Hein aided the Resistance--work that would cost Diet her freedom and Hein his life--their courageous effort ultimately saved hundreds of Dutch Jews.
Now available in paperback, Things We Couldn't Say tells an unforgettable story of heroism, faith, and--above all--love.
Both my parents were born in Leipzig, Germany and were survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in Upstate New York with stories my mother recounted about her family’s dramatic escape and the many harrowing moments they endured. I was fortunate enough to interview her before her death and to acquire the memoirs of her two sisters. I've always wanted to publish their astonishing story, and I'm thrilled that my readership spans many countries.This book highlights the many individual, family, and village rescuers that saved the lives of my mother’s family. I have stayed connected to the descendants of many of these rescuers and am forever grateful for the risks these heroic people took to save the lives of the Kroch family.
This is the extraordinary memoir of Irene, a young Catholic woman from Poland who was forced to work for the Russians and the Nazis. Her compassion began as a young child when she rescued and healed injured wild animals. She later trained as a nurse. What began as small, very risky acts to smuggle food to Jews in the Polish ghetto, soon turned into much more perilous endeavors. She ultimately singlehandedly hid and fed 12 Jews in the basement of a Nazi Major’s home while she was caring for him. Irene served as a resistance fighter and a partisan who hid in the woods with other saboteurs. This is a gripping, beautifully written story of the bravery and brilliance of a 20-year-old rescuer, recounted in her own words.
IRENE GUT WAS just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it.
“No matter how many Holocaust stories one has read, this one is a must, for its impact is so powerful.”—School Library Journal, Starred
A Book Sense Top Ten Pick
A Publisher’s Weekly Choice of the Year’s Best Books
