Here are 100 books that The Distant Hours fans have personally recommended if you like
The Distant Hours.
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I was a foreign correspondent seven time zones from home when my father died of a sudden heart attack. My grief mixed with guilt for never having sat down with him to unravel his vague vignettes about life and loss in the Holocaust. I wondered, how did he survive when so many perished? How much depended on resilience, smarts, or dumb luck? As reporters do, I started digging. I uncovered a Nazi paper trial that tracked his life from home, through ghettos, slave labor, concentration camps, death marches, and more. The tattered documents revealed a man very different from the quiet, quintessential Type-B Dad I knew…or thought I knew.
This novel left me feeling both teary-eyed and ennobled. Superficially, it is about two French sisters living through the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. At its root, however, Hannah deconstructs the essence of survival.
I loved how her characters frame the book’s cosmic questions: What would you do to survive? What compromises would you make? Is it better to fight back aggressively or resist passively? The sisters are of different temperaments and personalities. Each answers these questions differently, painfully. I found myself haunted by these themes long after I put The Nightingale back on the shelf. You will, too.
Soon to be a major motion picture, The Nightingale is a multi-million copy bestseller across the world. It is a heart-breakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the endurance of women.
This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II when women's stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked . . . Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals and passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards survival, love and freedom in war-torn France.
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
I can’t leave this book off the list! When I first read it as a teenager, I was so focused on the engrossing story of the four sisters that the fact it took place during the Civil War barely registered.
Upon rereading the novel as an adult, I can appreciate how the war profoundly affects the sisters’ lives through the absence of their father (and, for a time, their mother) and by creating an ever-present sense of uncertainty. I love the characterization and wisdom of this novel.
Louisa May Alcott shares the innocence of girlhood in this classic coming of age story about four sisters-Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.
In picturesque nineteenth-century New England, tomboyish Jo, beautiful Meg, fragile Beth, and romantic Amy are responsible for keeping a home while their father is off to war. At the same time, they must come to terms with their individual personalities-and make the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It can all be quite a challenge. But the March sisters, however different, are nurtured by their wise and beloved Marmee, bound by their love for each other and the feminine…
I’ve always been a lover of all things history, so it’s no surprise I gravitated to the world of historical fiction for my profession. What moves me the most is how, across time periods and culture, the bonds of family (more specifically sisters), remain one of the most enduring and poignant themes with which almost all can identify. Growing up, my relationship with my own sister was complex and difficult. However, now that we are grown, I can fully appreciate just how much my connection with her shaped—and continues to shape—the person I am. Exploring family ties in literature (both writing and reading) is one way in which I celebrate our common humanity.
This book has everything: love, drama, lush descriptions of a foreign country (essential now, when travel is so limited), and family curses. Having a sister myself, I loved how authentic the relationship between Emilia and Lucy felt; stronger than iron yet as fragile as glass. The unraveling mystery behind the so-called “curse” was just icing on the cake. Love truly is what life is all about---just not in the ways we always assume.
A trio of second-born daughters sets out on a whirlwind journey through the lush Italian countryside to break the family curse that says they’ll never find love, by New York Times bestseller Lori Nelson Spielman, author of The Life List.
Since the day Filomena Fontana cast a curse upon her sister more than two hundred years ago, not one second-born Fontana daughter has found lasting love. Some, like second-born Emilia, the happily-single baker at her grandfather’s Brooklyn deli, claim it’s an odd coincidence. Others, like her sexy, desperate-for-love cousin Lucy, insist…
My usual answer, when someone asks me where I live in Philadelphia, is: “Have you seen the Rocky movies, where he’s running through that open fruit/vegetable market? I’m three blocks from there.”I’ve called Philadelphia home for more than 20 years. I’m clearly a big fan, having now written four books about the city. I include a reference to the city’s most famous fictional character in my children’s alphabet book Philadelphia A to Z. In More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, I got to tell stories about the country’s largest public art program. In This Used To Be Philadelphia, I told the then and now stories of dozens of city locations.
More than 12,000 Philadelphia residents died when the Spanish Flu began global deaths in 1918. Although the virus had already wreaked havoc in New England, Philadelphia officials went ahead with plans for a scheduled parade designed to raise public funding for the Great War across the ocean. An estimated 200,000 people watched and cheered as soldiers, veterans, and workers involved in the war effort marched down Broad Street on Sept. 28, 1918. An article about the spectacle published that afternoon inThe Evening Bulletin, began “This is a great day in Philadelphia.”
But another article in the same edition noted that a police officer had died from the flu and more than 100 people had recently tested positive for the virus. The parade was what we now would call a “super spreader event.” Within weeks, “the grippe,” as many called the disease had killed thousands and shut down the…
From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War comes a novel set during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, telling the story of a family reborn through loss and love.
In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters—Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa—a chance at a better life.
Two of my three novels have young women protagonists. I find young adulthood a fascinating time in women’s lives and I enjoy creating a character and putting her in a historical setting. The Second World War offers fertile ground for storytelling, and I grew up south of London after the war. My father’s unpublished memoir, in which he describes an event that he experienced in the war, inspired me to write about it, but I told the story through the eyes of the protagonist, Kate.
I liked this story with two women protagonists because of its drama. The book had me mesmerized from beginning to end. One reason may be that I listened to the audiobook with the actress Rosamund Pike as narrator. She knew how to portray all the accents, from the (male) aristocrat Lucas Romer to the young woman spy Eva Delectorskaya.
I liked the dual timeline, with Eva’s adult daughter learning about her mother’s shocking hidden past as it is slowly revealed. I like books about mother/daughter relationships, and this is one of the better ones in that regard. But what kept me interested above all was the slow unfolding of the information and Eva’s haunted life.
'Eva Delectorskaya,' I said mystified. ' Who's that?' 'Me,' she said. 'I am Eva Delectorskaya.' What happens to your life when everything you thought you knew about your mother turns out to be an elaborate lie? During the long, hot summer of 1976, Ruth Gilmartin discovers that her very English mother Sally is really Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian emigre and one-time spy. In 1939 Eva is a beautiful twenty-eight year old living in Paris. As war breaks out, she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious, patrician Englishman. Under his tutelage she learns to become…
I’m a Southern girl from Atlanta who writes ‘entertainment with a soul’ from my writing chalet—tool shed—outside Lyon, France where my husband and I have worked with a non-profit for over 30 years. I love to incorporate little-known historical facts into my award-winning and best-selling contemporary, historical, and time-slip fiction. I want my reader to find not only a good story and an interesting plot, but also the soul in my book and in my characters with themes of betrayal, regret, redemption, forgiveness, and faith that allow my reader to think, to ask questions, to laugh and cry and hope. To be entertained way down in her soul.
Amanda’s dual-time novel is like reading a poem—the prose is breathtaking, the story compelling, the characters real and wounded, and the love story! In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman, Robert Bliss, submits a poem to a local newspaper and his humble words change the tide of a nation. Decades later, Annie Bliss is summoned back to Ansel-by-the-Sea when she learns her Great-Uncle Robert, the man who became her refuge during the hardest summer of her youth, is now the one in need of help. The time slip is expertly done, the story wild and wonderful, and again, I was inspired to try my hand at a time-slip novel after having soaked up every last drop of the water on the sand inWhose Waves These Are.
In the wake of WWII, a grieving fisherman submits a poem to a local newspaper: a rallying cry for hope, purpose . . . and rocks. Send me a rock for the person you lost, and I will build something life-giving. When the poem spreads farther than he ever intended, Robert Bliss's humble words change the tide of a nation. Boxes of rocks inundate the tiny, coastal Maine town, and he sets his calloused hands to work, but the building halts when tragedy strikes.
I am an author of short stories, young adult novels, romance, even a reference book, but I will read any genre and any age group. As a librarian, researcher, book reviewer, and former school teacher, I have a long-standing love for historical fiction. When an author gets the details right, and you feel transported in time and place to WWII, or the 18th century, or Victorian England…there is nothing sweeter. Witnessing humankind overcoming huge obstacles, facing the most that human nature can take, and coming out on top? Definitely literary therapy! So put down the cell phone, pour a hot cuppa, and let these favourites of mine transport you.
True confession time…after reading The Winemaker’s Wife I hightailed it to the library and took out all of Kristin Harmel’s historical fiction titles (Book of Lost Names!!). Yes, they are that good! In The Winemaker’s Wife, Harmel transports her readers to 1940, a time when WWII and the Nazi regime threatened the lives and livelihoods of a particular Champagne House in France. She expertly taps into all of the five senses in her tale of love and betrayal, of the unyielding power of the human spirit in the face of adversity, and of a Resistance movement hidden beneath the casks and caves of the winery. A riveting, read-in-one-sitting book!
The author of the “engrossing” (People) international bestseller The Room on Rue Amélie returns with a moving story set amid the champagne vineyards of France during the darkest days of World War II, perfect for fans of Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Champagne, 1940: Inès has just married Michel, the owner of storied champagne house Maison Chauveau, when the Germans invade. As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they’ll be exposed, but for Céline, the French-Jewish wife of Chauveau’s chef de cave, the risk is even…
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
Sarah’s Keykeeps us hoping in spite of ourselves—and despite the terrible odds facing a Jewish family in Paris, 1942. When the police come knocking one night, ten-year-old Sarah has no idea that her family is being rounded up for transport to an internment camp. She locks her little brother in a closet to save him, certain she’ll return the next day. That fateful choice will echo from WWII into the present, where the apartment’s new occupant uncovers long-ago choices and secrets in her own family. For me, though, the real question isn’t whether Sarah can rescue her brother. It’s about the many ways we justify our own ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and the hope that we can learn from history’s lessons.
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that…
A professor of Chinese and Japanese, Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies at Vassar College, my research has focused on the cross-cultural fertilization between Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. I’ve published widely on the subject, including a book, Bashô and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai. I began research on the “comfort women”—victimsof Imperial Japan’s military sexual slavery during the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945)—in 2002when working with a Vassar student on her thesis about the “comfort women” redressmovement. Since then, I’ve worked closely with Chinese researchers and local volunteers, interviewing the eyewitnesses and survivors of the Japanese military “comfort stations” in China,and visiting the now-defunct sites.
The novel One Left begins when the elderly protagonist hears a TV report on the lastsurviving Korean “comfort woman.” She is in fact also a comfort station survivor, one who has remained silent and hence unknown to the public. At the age of thirteen, she was kidnappedinto a Japanese military comfort station in northeast China. The protagonist's thoughts flash back andforth between her present-day life and the wartime horrors, the details of which are drawn from real survivors’ testimonies. “Fifteen men a day was normal,” she recalls, “but on Sundayfifty men or more might come and go from a girl.” “If a girl got pregnant, her uterus wasremoved fetus and all as a preventive measure.” It is a difficult read, but necessary, moving, and profound.
During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in "comfort stations" across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to Korea, where they lived as social outcasts. Since then, self-declared comfort women have come forward only to have their testimonies and calls for compensation largely denied by the Japanese government.
Kim Soom tells the story of a woman who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen while gathering snails for her starving family. The horrors of her life as a sex slave follow her back…
I’ve always adored science, and spent my teenage years searching for female role models in the sci-fi and popular science books I loved. I started out at university studying Aerospace Engineering, but upon discovering a severe allergy to lab reports, transferred to a Frankensteinian degree of my own making entitled, “Narratives of Science in Fiction and History,” which examined the interactions of science fiction and scientific history. Fascinated by nineteenth-century paleontology in particular, and wanting to learn more about women’s involvement in science during this period, I proposed as my final year project a joint creative writing/research project which would eventually become my first novel, Our Hideous Progeny.
Although this book centers a fictional scientist rather than a real one, the emotions and passion that the protagonist, Katherine, experiences feel all too real.
As a lifelong fan of mathematics, I’ve often felt that math is one of the most maligned branches of science, so I adored the way that Chung portrays Katherine’s love for the subject and the beauty of a good equation. (You can really tell that she herself has experience in the field!)
I also loved the way that Chung delved into the difficulties Katherine experiences as a woman of color in science in the decades after WWII, from outright racism and misogyny to the kind of constant, low-grade doubt and lack of support that can make being a minority in STEM so difficult.
'A young woman's battle for acceptance in a male-dominated world; her misadventures in love; and her torturous journey to track down her real parents in Germany' Mail on Sunday Best New Fiction
'What had seemed to be a Hidden Figures-style female-genius-in-a-male-world narrative turns into a thrilling back-to-my-roots mystery' Daily Telegraph
From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But as she grows up and becomes a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of…