Historical Fiction War Ii

Spring 1942. The United States is reeling from the blow the Japanese inflicted at Pearl Harbor. But the Americans are determined to turn the tide. The key comes from Commander Joe Rochefort, a little known “code breaker” who cracks the Japanese military encryption. With Rochefort’s astonishing discovery, Admiral Chester Nimitz will know precisely what the Japanese are planning.

Though war rages across mainland Europe and London is strafed by German aircraft, the little village of Pipley in Hertfordshire bustles along much as it always has. Olive Bright, 22, fills her days by helping at her father's veterinary practice and tending to her beloved racing pigeons. Desperate to do her bit, Olive hopes that the National Pigeon Service will enlist Bright Lofts' expertise and use their highly trained birds to deliver critical, coded messages for His Majesty's Forces.

From the author of The School for German Brides, this captivating historical novel set in nineteenth-century and post-World War II Paris follows two fierce women of the same family, generations apart, who find that their futures lie in the four walls of a simple bakery in a tiny corner of Montmartre.

In The Commodore, the navy in 1942-1943 is fighting a losing battle against Japan for control of the Solomon Islands. Vice Admiral William "Bull" Halsey is tasked with changing the course of the war. Halsey, a maverick, goes on the offensive and appoints a host of new destroyer commanders, including a wild card named Harmon Wolf. An American Indian from a Minnesota reservation, Wolf has never fit in with the traditional navy officer corps. But under Halsey, Wolf's aggressive tactics and gambling nature bring immediate results.

Scott Bradley James arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, as a plebe in the class of 1941 without a terribly good idea why he wants to be a naval officer, other than that his father was a sailor, and he wants to see the world, whatever that means. Scott and his roommate become fast friends, and, after surviving scrapes of their own making, the two fetch up at Pearl Harbor. War is brewing, and their class has graduated early. They have been sent to battle stations.

Twelve-year old Sheldon Horowitz is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother only a year ago when a suspicious traffic accident steals the life of his father near their home in rural Massachusetts. It is 1938, and Sheldon, who was in the truck, emerges from the crash an orphan hell-bent on revenge. He takes that fire with him to Hartford, where he embarks on a new life under the roof of his buttoned-up Uncle Nate.

From the legendary actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film...and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.

All her life, Zofia has found comfort in two things during times of hardship: books and her best friend, Janina. But no one could have imagined the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. As the bombs rain down and Hitler’s forces loot and destroy the city, Zofia finds that now books are also in need of saving. With the death count rising and persecution intensifying, Zofia jumps to action to save her friend and salvage whatever books she can from the wreckage, hiding them away, and even starting a clandestine book club.

1939: Adolf Hitler, fallen from power, seeks refuge in a London engulfed in the throes of a very British Fascism. Now eking a miserable living as a down-at-heels private eye and calling himself Wolf, he has no choice but to take on the case of a glamorous Jewish heiress whose sister went missing. It's a decision Wolf will very shortly regret. For in another time and place a man lies dreaming: Shomer, once a Yiddish pulp writer, who dreams lurid tales of revenge in the hell that is Auschwitz.

Rudi Graf is an engineer who always dreamed of sending rockets to the moon. But instead, he finds himself working alongside Wernher von Braun, launching V2 rockets at London for the Nazis from a bleak seaside town in occupied Holland. As the SS increases its scrutiny of the project, Graf, an engineer more than a soldier, has to muster all of his willpower to toe the party line. And when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a prime suspect.

What's a 22-year-old Irish American cop who's never been out of Massachusetts before doing at Beardsley Hall, an English country house, having lunch with King Haakon of Norway? Billy Boyle himself wonders. Back home in Southie, hed barely made detective when war was declared. Unwilling to fight and perhaps die for England, he was relieved when his mother wangled a job for him on the staff of a general married to her distant cousin.

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

When Stefania Carmichael steps into the mysterious world of Bletchley Park, she immediately finds herself signing the Official Secrets Act. In whispers, she is told that she’s been recruited because of her talent for languages. Before the war ripped Europe apart, Stefania was living in Rome, charming everyone she met, and engaged to the man of her dreams, handsome and brave Matteo. And now everything has changed. With secrets swirling around the building, Stefania finds it hard to know who to trust, until she forms a close bond with two other new recruits.

The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.

Hans Fallada wrote this stunning novel in only 24 days - just after being released from a Nazi insane asylum. Based on a true story, Every Man Dies Alone tells of a German couple who try to start an uprising by distributing anti-fascist postcards during World War II. But their dream ultimately proves perilous under the tyranny that dominates every corner of Hitler’s Germany.

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.

Peter and his two-year-old daughter, Sara, escape war-torn Poland after World War 2 and settle in Pennsylvania, but when tragedy strikes 21 years later, the dark secrets of the past will be revealed. Realizing her family is being targeted, and without her father to turn to, Sara teams up with Tom Kirby, an FBI agent who’s meeting a wall of silence at every turn. Working with and getting ever closer to Tom, Sara will reveal secrets and conspiracies that stretch from the Philadelphia underworld all the way back to the darkest days of the Holocaust in Poland.

One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs - each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war.

In 1944, twenty-three-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina, a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess’s new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife, and shows no interest in making love. Tess quickly realizes she’s trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out.

November, 1941. She’s never even seen the ocean before, but Eva Cassidy has her reasons for making the crossing to Hawaii, and they run a lot deeper than escaping a harsh Michigan winter. Newly enlisted as an Army Corps nurse, Eva is stunned by the splendor she experiences aboard the steamship SS Lurline; even more so by Lt. Clark Spencer, a man she is drawn to but who clearly has secrets of his own. But Eva’s past - and the future she’s trying to create - means that she’s not free to follow her heart.