I’m endlessly fascinated by the stories of young women from the WW2 era, who came of age at the moment the world was torn apart. As an author of wartime historical fiction with strong female characters, it’s vital for me to understand the experience of ordinary women who grew up in such extraordinary times, so I’m always on the hunt for real voices from the era. I’d love to think that in similar circumstances I’d face my challenges with the same humour, resourcefulness, bravery, and humanity as my favourite five female memoirists selected for you here.
Some wartime memoirs are fascinating because they detail the lives of ordinary women in extraordinary times. But Nancy Wake was never ordinary. Brave, beautiful, and bull-headed, this feisty Australian worked undercover for the British Secret Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied France, leading French resistance fighters in sabotage missions against the Nazis. Nicknamed ‘The White Mouse’ by the Gestapo, Nancy was a key player in the Resistance, earning herself a clutch of medals after the war, including France’s Legion d’Honneur. There are plenty of biographies about this remarkable woman, but I recommend this, because it’s in her own words, and to me, that’s what makes it a special read.
Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling.
After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for allied soldiers. Eventually Nancy had to escape from France herself to avoid…
I enjoy reading books that have an element of excitement, the element of the chase appeals, as does the idea of an ordinary citizen being caught up by accident or coincidence in either international espionage or terrorist situations. I have devoted many years to writing, and have written up to 20 novels of which four have so far been published, mainly on themes as described above, or in the espionage field similar to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where the investigator, starting from scratch, is attempting to trace a mole within the organisation.
The main character, an armaments engineer, becomes a target of the (then) Nazi government in Germany to prevent his expertise from being used to cement an Anglo-Turkish alliance in 1939. Their aim is to assassinate him. The story details the situation of an ordinary citizen caught up in international intrigue and how he manages to cope with it.
My liking and recommendation of this book is similar to that of my first choice, an innocent and ordinary individual who finds himself on the run to avoid capture and possible death by enemy agents, the means he utilises to make himself inconspicuous and evade them, and his fury at the end which enables him to turn the tables despite being out of his depth.
A thrilling, intense, and masterfully plotted classic suspense tale from one of the founders of the genre.
Returning to his hotel room after a late-night flirtation with a cabaret dancer at an Istanbul boîte, Graham is surprised by an intruder with a gun. What follows is a nightmare of intrigue for the English armaments engineer as he makes his way home aboard an Italian freighter. Among the passengers are a couple of Nazi assassins intent on preventing his returning to England with plans for a Turkish defense system, the seductive cabaret dancer and her manager husband, and a number of…
I have always been intrigued by history, fictional and nonfictional. Unfortunately, warfare is a large part of history and spying is an important part of warfare, and is as old as warfare itself. If you want to win the war you need to know as much as possible about what your enemy is planning to do. I am also a puzzle solver, and making and breaking codes play a large part in spying. I have traveled widely and been to most of the places I write about. However, I am a pacifist at heart, and I keep looking for the key to world peace.
This is a good book to read if you want to know what it felt like to be in France or other European countries in 1938 before the start of World War II when my father was saying how bad Hitler was but people didn’t believe it. Bad things were already happening and much worse things were to come. In some places you couldn't trust anybody because everybody could be a spy. People who lived in France and didn't want to leave had to face the fact that if they didn't they might lose their freedom and their lives. Franco was leading a revolution to take over Spain, and he had help from the Axis powers. This is an excellent spy novel with an accurate historical setting.
Paris, 1938. Democratic forces are locked in struggle as the shadow of war edges over Europe.
Cristian Ferrar, a handsome Spanish lawyer in Paris, is approached to help a clandestine agency supply weapons to beleaguered Republican forces. He agrees, putting his life on the line.
Joining Ferrar in his mission is an unlikely group of allies: idealists and gangsters, arms dealers, aristocrats and spies. From libertine nightclubs in Paris to shady bars by the docks in Gdansk, Furst paints a spell-binding portrait of a continent marching into a nightmare - and the heroes and heroines who fought back.
I’ve been reading historical fiction since childhood—it’s my preferred method for learning history. I want to know who people were in an everyday way, not as broad-brush reporting. My tastes are not limited to particular eras although I do my best to skip as much battle detail as I can. I like historical fiction that has character as its throughline. Who are these people? What do/did they want? How did they get it? I think my theatre background and training are what make me ask questions like these. What did they have for dinner? What did they talk about? Their excesses, their eccentricities, their excellences.
Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. A finishing school? Um, ye-ees. For spies. Spies? Uh-huh. On a dirigible. A—what? In a culture where vampires and werewolves are part of society. Wrapped in a huge steampunk bow. Etiquette and espionage. Curtsies and conspiracies. Waistcoats and weaponry. Manners and mutiny. What could possibly go wrong? (What can’t?) Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse is their entirely diabolically magical setting. Her writing is laugh-out-loud clever, witty as Noel Coward, deeply principled, and there are tons more. I started with the Alexia Tarabotti seven and read every single one. I’d do it again, too. Her heroines make my heart go pitter-pat. With glee.
It's one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It's quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to finishing school.
Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners-and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.
But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might…
I have always been fascinated by the sociopathic mind. I sometimes feel that sociopaths are, in many ways, freer than the rest of us. They are divorced from the crippling feelings of guilt and remorse. Throughout my writing career, I have interacted with both cops and career criminals and I have become convinced that they share similar mindsets. They may not be full-blown sociopaths (though some are), but they have what I would call “a touch” of the sociopathic mind. They are essentially the same people. This is a theme that I find my writing continually dwells on—the freedom of having an anti-social personality and its consequences for both society and the individual.
This ballsy, initially self-published debut novel from the late, great Vince Flynn asks: What if unknown, highly-skilled assassins began killing off politicians until Washington agrees to set aside partisan politics and restore power to the people? It’s basically draining the swamp with a rifle barrel. It’s a controversial premise, but a hell of an entertaining read and even though the novel was written in 1997, it feels timely as ever. Personally, I love when novels explore social issues in entertaining ways. This is something I strive to accomplish in each of my novels. Term Limitspulls it off with flying colors.
On an overcast night in Washington D.C. a group of highly trained killers embark on a mission of shattering brutality. A shocked country awakens to the devastating news that three of their most powerful and unscrupulous politicians have been brutally murdered. In the political firestorm and media frenzy that follow, the assassins release their demands: either the country's leaders set aside their petty, partisan politics and restore power to the people, or be held to deadly account. Only Michael O'Rourke, a junior congressman, holds a clue to the violence: a haunting incident in his own past with explosive implications for…
Andrew Lownie is a former journalist for The London Times, the British representative for the Washington-based National Intelligence Centre, and he helped set up the Spy Museum in Washington. His books include biographies of the writer John Buchan, the spy Guy Burgess (which won the St Ermin’s Hotel Intelligence Book Prize), Dickie & Edwina Mountbatten (a top ten Sunday Times bestseller) and a forthcoming book on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Kim Philby’s most personal betrayal was not of Nicholas Elliott, as suggested in Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends , but his school friend and another MI6 colleague Tim Milne , the nephew of Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne, whom he falsely accused of being a spy in order to deflect attention from himself. Milne’s memoirs were finally permitted to be published four years after his death and provide a fascinating and fresh glimpse into both Philby and Burgess especially Milne’s teenage European travels with Philby and his August 1948 visit to Philby in Turkey where he remembered fellow guest Burgess ‘lolling in a window seat, dirty, unshaven, wearing nothing but an inadequately fastened dressing-gown”, singing on jeep rides into the countryside and diving into the Bosphorus from a second floor balcony.
Foreword by Phillip Knightley Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor. A Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence, at one point heading up the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies within MI6, he betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union. Ian Innes 'Tim' Milne was Phiby's closest and oldest friend. They studied at Westminster School together and when Philby joined MI6 he immediately recruited Milne as his deputy. Philby's treachery was a huge blow to…
As a kid, I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent. As an adult, I became one. The job introduced me to the classified and shadowy world of national security. I traveled the globe, working in places I'd only read about in novels and meeting people who seemed like well-written characters from a book. When I was assigned as a liaison agent to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, I attended numerous FBI and CIA schools—even the facility known as The Farm. But through it all, I read! When I retired and had time to think about what I did, I figured I'd try writing.
During my time working in the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, we would "throw out a line to see if anything bit." By that, I mean we'd leak information into the terrorism community to see their response.
That response often determined which direction we'd take an investigation. That's what the plot of The Russia House does. The CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service get a taste of information from an inside Russian military source, but can it be believed?
John le Carre's first post-glasnost spy novel, The Russia House captures the effect of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy puppet-masters who command them
Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise. Nearly a year later, his drunken promise…
This
novel sparked my initial interest in learning more about the history of the
IRA.
It’s a well-told tale of a group of Irish nationalists (or
criminals/terrorists, depending on your point of view) who hatch a complex plot
to take over St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City (with hostages, naturally)
on St. Patrick’s Day—and the detectives trying to stop them.
While some of the
language is a bit dated (it was published in 1981) with the expected
stereotypes and so on, the story is well-plotted, the characters are well-drawn
and their motivations plausible, and, best of all, the minute detail about the interior
of the cathedralis believable.
The infighting among the various branches of
law enforcement and local politicians is also very well done and entirely accurate:
mostly, they want to avoid blame.
St Patrick's Day, New York City. Everyone is celebrating but everyone is in for the shock of his life. Born into the heat and hatred of the Northern Ireland conflict, IRA man Brian Flynn has masterminded a brilliant terrorist act - the seizure of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Among his hostages: the woman Brian Flynn once loved, a former terrorist turned peace activist. Among his enemies: an Irish-American police lieutenant fighting against a traitor inside his own ranks and a shadowy British intelligence officer pursuing his own cynical, bloody plan. The cops face a booby-trapped, perfectly laid out killing zone inside…
I am a novelist with a passion for reading and it is this which I feel qualifies me to speak on this topic. My reading is eclectic across the crime/mystery genre and there’s nothing I love more than a book that sucks me right into the same world its characters inhabit, something all five of my choices did. As a novelist I appreciate the way these novels all use the weather conditions to add an extra layer of threat to the protagonists and it’s something I’ve always wanted to emulate.
One of Cussler’s earlier novels featuring Dirk Pitt, Cussler sends his erstwhile hero deep into a desert landscape where he throws all manner of problems at them.
As Pitt and co battle to survive the harsh conditions, they are tested to the limit as they must not only escape the arid landscape, but do in time to foil a dastardly plot. While perhaps not as much of a literary heavyweight as some of the other authors mentioned on this list, Cussler is brilliant at writing a rollicking good yarn.
The eleventh classic Dirk Pitt novel, where the adventurer is drawn to a secret in the burning African desert, which could destroy all life in the world's seas.
A CREEPING RED TIDE OF DEATH
Deep in the African desert, Dirk Pitt discovers that a top secret scientific installation is leaking a lethal chemical into the rivers, threatening to kill thousands of people - and to destroy all life in the world's seas.
To warn the world of the catastrophe, Pitt must escape capture and death at the hands of a ruthless West African dictator and French industrialist, and undertake a…
Although published posthumously in 2021,Silverview was substantially written, then set aside, some time before John le Carré died. His son Nick Cornwell (aka novelist Nick Harkaway), who edited the book for publication, speculates in an afterword that this was because its view of British Intelligence was more disenchanted than any of Le Carré’s previous novels.
I wonder whether there were two further reasons, one profound and one prosaic: that the novel is suffused with death and would therefore make an appropriately elegiac swansong, and that as his shortest novel in nearly 40 years, it would better bookend his 1961 debut, Call for the Dead.
Whatever the reason, it’s a classic Le Carré tale of loyalty and betrayal - and a book that will always be one of my favorite reads in any given year.
Korean edition of [Silverview] by John Le Carre. An instant New York Times bestseller. In his last completed novel, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years--the secret world itself. A mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. Korean edition translated by Jo Yeong Hak.
