37 authors created a book list connected to the London Blitz, and here are their favorites. I also recommend checking out their picks for the best novels about The Blitz as well.
Reading allows us to climb inside other people’s heads, to think their thoughts and feel their feelings. For children, in particular, books can be a way to understand new emotions. To name them and start to think about where they come from. As my son started to grow up, I wanted to write a story that helped him think about other people’s feelings. And that’s what The Hug and its follow-ups are all about.
A little lost bear, all alone in a major transport hub, 6,000 miles from Peru, with only his name pinned to his tiny little duffle coat and the crumbs of his last marmalade sandwich rattling round his case. If that doesn’t melt your heart, then there’s no hope for you. Rumored to have been inspired by children sent away from cities during the Blitz. Has been making children think of others ever since.
The classic story of Paddington, the bear from Darkest Peru, who was found lost on Paddington Station.
"A bear on Paddington Station?" said Mrs Brown in amazement. "Don't be silly - there can't be."
The Browns first met Paddington on a railway station - Paddington station, in fact. He had travelled all the way from Darkest Peru with only a jar of marmalade, a suitcase and his hat.
The Browns soon found that Paddington was a very unusual bear. Ordinary things - like having a bath, travelling underground or going to the seaside became quite extraordinary, if a bear called…
A lover of fiction since my teens, I only really took an interest in history in my 20s. I’m fascinated with WWII and the 1950s due to family histories and having visited key sites, like Bletchley Park and the Command Bunker in Uxbridge, near where I grew up. I’m not especially patriotic, but I am proud of what Britain had to do in 1940, as well as the toll the war took and the years of recovery. But it’s also the time, albeit decreasingly so, when people still alive today can look back at their youth, and we can all have a nostalgia for that time in our lives.
It is a beautifully atmospheric, Blitz-era novel about passions and complex relationships in the noir blackout and who can be trusted in such times.
Published just after the war, it captures the period in a way that those born decades later can only dream of doing. My mum was an un-evacuated child in London during the Blitz, and her school was bombed to the ground by the Luftwaffe—but luckily, on a Saturday.
England is flawed as a nation, then and now, but it’s important to remember the unique evil of the Nazis. Most individuals are flawed in much more minor ways. The novels I have chosen all contain imperfect people making mistakes. To me, that’s true life. It’s what I relate to.
It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.
I lived in London for eighteen years and acquired an abiding affection for my nation’s capital. I wanted to write a sequel to Bluebirds and jumped at the chance of giving Bryan Hale an adventure where he could walk the streets that I knew and loved. The scars caused on the fair face of London by sticks of Nazi bombs landing in ragged lines across the streets and terraces may still be discerned from the incongruity of the buildings that have since risen to fill the gaps. London heals and thrives. Ultimately, I believe every English writer harbours an ambition to write a London novel. I did, and I did.
Today, it is almost impossible to imagine aircraft roaming freely over British cities, disgorging bombs onto the streets below. So, it’s vital for us to have access to the personal, unvarnished stories and contemporary accounts from those that actually lived through this particular horror. In The Secret History of the Blitz Levine pulls no punches as he documents the behaviour of ordinary people faced with extreme experiences. Some reacted with fortitude, uniting in neighbourhood solidarity and extending charity to strangers. Others exploited the chaos, breaking legal and moral codes for their own personal enrichment. To this day, the British psyche collectively benefits from the social concept of a Blitz Spirit. But we should remember it was always a two-sided coin.
The Blitz of 1940-41 is one of the most iconic periods in modern British history - and one of the most misunderstood. The 'Blitz spirit' is celebrated by some, whereas others dismiss it as a myth. Joshua Levine's thrilling biography rejects the tired arguments and reveals the human truth: the Blitz was a time of extremes of experience and behaviour. People werepulling together and helping strangers, but they were also breaking rules and exploiting each other. Life during wartime, the author reveals, was complex and messy and real.
From the first page readers will discover a different story to the…
I loved this book because of Johnathan’s fighting spirit.
Many war stories are about the fighting – the soldiers’ stories. This story is about the thoughts and life of a boy who was a child at the start of World War ll. He tells of how his father goes off to war. He suffers through the blitz and losing his home. He is forced to live with other relatives, and eventually to go away from his family to another part of the country.
It is interesting reading about a boy’s understanding and confusion about catastrophic events, and how these events shape his behavior, before eventually arriving at a more peaceful outlook on life.
At one time, it was commonplace for male mystery writers to devote a substantial amount of plot to romance; for example, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White or Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon. In recent years, this tradition has eroded to the point where romantic mysteries are primarily written by women. I think romance spices up mysteries. In Death is Potential, Kate Swift is more invested in solving the murder mystery because she is protecting her lover.
I like this series set in wartime London. Electra “Ellie” McDonnell, a safecracker, is in business with her Uncle Mick, they rob homes of the rich.
After they are arrested, the handsome Major Ramsay has a deal for Ellie: if she will help him, he’ll let her, and her uncle walk free. A straightforward deal, except for the romantic complication.
As the Blitz continues to ravage London, Ellie McDonnell is approached by British Intelligence officer Major Ramsey with a new assignment. She is to travel under an assumed identity to the port city of Sunderland and there await further instructions. Ellie, ever-ready to aid her country, heads north, her safecracking tools in tow. But before she can rendezvous with the major, she witnesses an unnatural death. A man falls dead in the street in front of her, with a mysterious missive clutched in his hand. Ellie's instincts tell her that the man's death is connected in some way to her…
I like stories of everyday people dealing with
WWII, and this is it. London during the Blitz is a difficult place to find
love, but Maisie and Cal are trying.
The book is well-researched and well-written, making readers feel the daily struggle of staying safe and the
terror of night raids. I loved the hobby shop and would've liked to have seen
more of the stock and customers, but the main characters are compelling enough
that you root for them from page one.
Clever of the author to tease the reader
at the end...no spoilers!This is the first in a series, and I can't wait for the next novel to
come out!
A forbidden wartime romance begins just as German planes fill the skies over London in 1940. A playful and heartfelt read perfect for fans of Dear. Mrs. Bird, The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, and The Last Bookshop in London.
When Maisie Beckett arrives to work at her brother’s hobby shop while he’s serving in the war, she soon discovers it’s in financial ruin. She also finds London preparing for an impending Nazi invasion. Determined to keep the shop open and prove herself to her parents, Maisie moonlights as a pinup photographer to pad the shop’s till while the shop’s co-owner, Cal…
I’m a Virginia-based science fiction and fantasy writer who’s lived variously-enriching lives as a coroner’s assistant, customer service manager, university lecturer, secretary, factory technician, and clerk. I’ve bounced all around the Midwest, from Minnesota to Ohio to Colorado to Missouri and now out on the East Coast.
It’s too easy, in time travel fantasies, to imagine that you would feel a step above the people around you... that you alone know what’s coming, and just, in general, have your advanced-future-person perspective on the world. That’s not how history should feel. The All Clear series’s time-traveling historians arrive to observe the London Blitz and have that comforting certainty ripped out from underneath them. They’re left lost, alone, and isolated in a well-painted portrait of a world on the edge of collapse.
Award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds - great and small - of ordinary people who shape history.
From books to television, one of my favorite qualities of good writing is a rich, inter-generational cast of characters, especially ones that feature significant roles for characters young and old. These stories do not span multiple generations; instead, they showcase characters of all ages interacting at one time, which makes for dynamic plots and relationships.
Easily one of my top favorite books, this novel captures so much: the great character of Lovejoy, the realities of post-war London, and a plot that reflects the human search for beauty amid horror, life amid death.
The motifs, settings, and themes have such a strong impact on me to this day after having read it for the first time so long ago. There is something neat about the older folks thinking of the neighborhood “orphans” as sparrows, frittering away at the building of something special.
'A masterpiece of construction and utterly realistically convincing' JACQUELINE WILSON
'Author Godden here tries her deft writing hand at landscaping a child's heart' TIME
'It is a sentimental tale, well told, with an unlikely and entirely satisfactory ending' NEW YORKER
Someone has been digging up the private garden in the Square. Miss Angela Chesney of the Garden Committee is sure that a gang of local boys is to blame, but her sister, Olivia, isn't so sure. She wonders why the neighbourhood children - 'sparrows' she…
My first animal story, Lost in the Snow, was based on stories that my mum and I invented together when I was very small, about our stray cat Rosie. She walked into my dad’s office and sat down in his chair when he was out at lunch! I loved imagining her adventures as a stray kitten, and those stories could be scary, sad, emotional as anything – because we knew she came home to live safe and happy with us. I’ve been creating stories about animals ever since.
This gorgeously illustrated book is the story of Morgan, who becomes the Book Cat at the real publisher Faber. I adored TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a child, and Morgan was a real cat who was one of the inspirations for the poems. These are his adventures during the London Blitz – in some ways a familiar story, but so moving from a cat’s point of view!
This is a classic wartime tale of a (real!) cat who made his home at the Faber offices and decided he'd never leave.
'This time we need to get you - get all of the kittens, safe out of London,' said Morgan decisively . . . 'To have a chance for a better life, well, let's just say, I've got an idea.'
Morgan is a young orphan who lives off scavenging - until he finds a cosy home at a famous London publishing house. Over time he learns a trade - and soon becomes the very best book cat in…
I moved to Britain from Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, in 1986. Still in my early twenties, I was a published poet in Serbian, but I didn’t dream I would eventually become a novelist in English. I devoured any English book that dealt with East-West encounters. I must have read several hundred as I researched my first book, Inventing Ruritania, a cultural study of the “Wild East”. I returned to them when I wrote Iron Curtain, a novel about a “Red Princess” from an unnamed East European country who marries an impecunious English poet. I sometimes thought of it as Ruritania writes back.
This book about Yugoslavia is my favourite work of travel writing, all the more remarkable for being written during the Blitz, amid the sound of bombs raining over London.
It is half-a-million words long and it deals with a country that doesn’t exist anymore – but don’t let that put you off. Historians and critics have called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon the greatest travel book of the twentieth century and I agree.
Rebecca West discovered Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War because – in the growing certainty of the apocalypse which was facing Europe – she wanted to write about a small country and its relationship with great empires.
Yugoslavia seemed at first an almost accidental choice but it changed her life.
'Impossible to put down' Observer 'One of the great books of the century' Times Literary Supplement
Rebecca West's epic masterpiece not only provides deep insight into the former country of Yugoslavia; it is a portrait of Europe on the brink of war. A heady cocktail of personal travelogue and historical insight, this product of an implacably inquisitive intelligence remains essential for anyone attempting to understand the history of the Balkan states, and the wider ongoing implications for a fractured Europe.
