The most recommended WW2 fiction books

As in all the books I have recommended the research is impeccable and there is much to be learned about the eras in which the novels are set. And, always, the woman at the heart of each story displays a great strength of character that carries her through adversity.

A Sunlit Weapon is the most recent book in the Maisie Dobbs series. In Maisie, we meet a young woman who began her life “below stairs” and who has grown up, again rising above almost impossible circumstances to gain an education, become a nurse in the Great War, marry into the upper classes only to lose her titled husband in a flying accident and finally, to set up her own business as a Psychologist and Investigator.

Recalling Ibbotson’s personal experience of leaving Austria for England before Hitler’s Anschluss, The Morning Gift is a witty and warm marriage of convenience story between a witty and intrepid archaeologist, Quinton Somerville, and a brilliant professor’s daughter Ruth Berger. When Ruth is accidentally left behind in Vienna after her family has emigrated to England, Quin marries Jewish Ruth and protects her from oncoming Nazi occupation: under the condition that they will part ways when both are safely back in London. But Quin and Ruth continue to run into each other again and again and again. A deliciously Austrian-flavoured book. Ibbotson’s Viennese set-sequences and memories are a love letter to her city.

Stockings with seams, blood-red lipstick, smokey jazz clubs, and unbelievably strong leading ladies—okay, I just said it all in that opening sentence. This book gripped me from the beginning. I could tell from the nail-biting opening that it was going to be gritty and realistic but also revel in the elegance of the time period.

Set in the US during the Second World War, this book is part of a long, slow burn of four incredible reads that I totally devoured and absolutely loved. It's an absorbing, almost infuriating mystery that can only be solved by the love between the two leads. The character of Kathryn, in particular, will stay with me forever. 

I’m a huge fan of Werner Herzog, the director who gave us cinematic treats such as Fitzcarraldo and Bad Lieutenant, as well as startling documentaries like Grizzly Man.

As a multi-decade resident of Japan, I’ve been long intrigued by the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued to patrol a remote island in the Philippines until he finally surrendered in 1974. Herzog’s first novel puts you inside the head of Onoda, a man that many would consider crazy, and makes you understand the obsessive logic of his worldview and marvel at his survivalist skills.

It’s a short book, but it made me think about how we construct the collective illusion we call reality. Those who refuse to accept it – like Onoda and the hero of Fitzcarraldo – we call madmen or geniuses.

In her stirring World War II novel Sharon Maas weaves an exhilarating adventure with a deeply moving personal journey.

The perilous exploits of the protagonist, Sibyl Lake, a spy for the French Resistance, will keep the pages flying by; the deftly drawn characters will remain with you long after the final page.

Sibyl, her comrades, and even her adversaries come alive as multidimensional human beings and not as the stereotypical, cartoonish figures sometimes seen in World War II fiction.

If you’re ready to be jarred by shocking plot twists or to have your heart melted by tender love scenes, then this is the book for you.

This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.

Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.

Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.

Even though this book is mainly about a group of Germans trying to kidnap Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he is on his way to the Tehran Conference in 1943, the backstory gave me a few ideas for my book. It has an unusual story of an English woman revered by the villagers, but only when the Germans take over the village, her real identity is revealed. She is actually a Boer and was a survivor of a Boer Concentration camp run by the British during the Second Anglo Boer in South Africa. Filled with vengeance against the British for what they did to the Boers and to her family, she changes her identity, moves to England, and works as a spy for the Germans to kidnap PM Churchill. 

For a woman brought up on a diet of PG Wodehouse, the character of Mrs. Bird felt like an old friend.

She is larger than life in the best sense of the word and this story of Emmy Lake and her wartime experience of working for the formidable woman is a joy from beginning to end. You are rooting for Emmy at every step first in her bid for journalistic stardom and then when she decides to play agony aunt to the women who desperately need her help.

A gorgeous, uplifting treat of a read.

The Irish writer Colm Toíbín is one of our greatest novelists.

The Magician, a fictional biography of the German writer Thomas Mann, is a madcap family epic. So immediate are Toíbín’s portraits of Mann, his wife, and his children that one thinks one knows them. But Toíbín also offers a brilliant portrait of Mann as a writer.

We get inside his mind as he writes about his unfulfilled erotic desires. But perhaps what is most compelling for me is Toíbín’s portrait of Germany in the 1930s. Mann fled Germany for Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor, and eventually moved to the U.S. He was one of the few ex-pat German writers to speak publicly against the Nazis.

What is most impressive is how Toíbín examines, through Mann, what made Germany susceptible to Nazism. I have not read it more subtly and more compellingly explained.  

I am fascinated by stories that encapsulate a whole life, usually from the perspective of a character looking back, assessing, wondering, and coming to terms with all that has transpired, both personally and globally. I am particularly fascinated by multi-dimensional female characters.

I was taken from page one by how well this story transitioned through different perspectives to offer a kaleidoscopic view of a life lived by a strong, unapologetic, complicated woman.