Literary Fiction War

This novel spans the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

Eli's Promise is a masterful work of historical fiction spanning three eras—Nazi-occupied Poland, the American Zone of post-war Germany, and Chicago at the height of the Vietnam War. Award-winning author Ronald H. Balson explores the human cost of war, the mixed blessings of survival, and the enduring strength of family bonds.

Hot on the trail of The Wolf, a rogue Russian military sniper turned Chechen terrorist, Gil Shannon turns from hunter to hunted when his mission is exposed by a traitor high up in US government. Shannon must turn to an unlikely ally - a deadly Russian special operative - to help even the odds.

It’s 1940 and Hannie Schaft is a shy nineteen-year-old law student living in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with ambitious goals for her future. But dreams die in wartime, and Hannie’s closest friends are no longer safe as fascism insidiously rises in her country. Hiding them is not enough. Hannie may be young but she can’t stand aside as the menace of Nazi evil tightens its grip. Driven by love and moral outrage, Hannie soon becomes an armed member of the Dutch Resistance movement.

Would you risk your life to save just one person? An incredible story of love, hope, and friendship; and a testament to humanity and courage in history’s darkest days. 1941, Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Professor Josef Held has never recovered from the loss of his beloved wife - and has no intention of ever letting anyone new into his quiet, safe world. But then the Nazis come for the Jews - and Mrs Epstein is killed. And Josef, in an impulsive act of courage, offers his student Michael Blum a place to hide.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy's finest achievment, chronicles the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.

Hungary, 1943: As war encroaches on the country’s borders, willful young Eva César arrives in the idyllic town of Sopron to spend her last summer as a single woman on her aristocratic family’s estate. Longing for freedom from her domineering father, she counts the days to her upcoming nuptials to a kind and dedicated Red Cross doctor whom she greatly admires. But Eva’s life changes when she meets Aleandro, a charming and passionate Romani fiddler and artist.

BERLIN, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the south of France, where the widow of an old friend of her husband’s has agreed to take her in. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.

Berlin, 1989. As the wall between East and West falls, Miriam Winter cares for her dying father, Henryk. When he cries out for someone named Frieda - and Miriam discovers an Auschwitz tattoo hidden under his watch strap - Henryk’s secret history begins to unravel. Searching for more clues of her father’s past, Miriam finds an inmate uniform from the Ravensbrück women’s camp concealed among her mother’s things. Within its seams are dozens of letters to Henryk written by Frieda.

It's a foul night in late October 1916. You're alone, in the cockpit of a frail, unreliable biplane, chasing a Leviathan in the darkness. A Zeppelin, somewhere out there in the night, sent to attack your country. You're cold, frightened, with nothing but your own thoughts and memories for company. And you're 20 years old.

On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be listened to one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence. The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl.

Georgian mansion Wharton Park was a place of childhood solace for Julia Forrester, spending summers in the Norfolk countryside with her beloved grandfather. So after tragedy strikes, she finds herself seeking comfort at Wharton and the allure of its hothouse, once home to exotic flowers from all corners of the globe but now lying abandoned. There she meets the new owner, the charming and magnetic Kit Crawford, whose own past is shrouded in sadness and mystery.

1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.

It is 1781, and the British-held American port of Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay is under siege. Pounded by the American colonists on land and the deadly warships of their French allies at sea, the once proud city is in flames and near ruin. But on the horizon, the King's own fleet of heavily armed frigates heads full sail to blast through France's blockade. Aboard His Majesty's swift flagship DESPERATE, midshipman Alan Lewrie quickly sets his gunners to their lethal work, firing rapid broadsides of 24 pound shot at the enemy vessels.

Xiang Li Cheng, the President of the People's Republic of China, has both a problem and a plan in Rick Campbell's thrilling Empire Rising. The problem is that the limited supply of oil available to China is threatening to derail his country's economic growth and prosperity. But to secure access to those resources, he must contend with powerful U.S. Navy and the Pacific Fleet. After a decades-long largely secret military build up, Cheng sets his plan in motion by suddenly invading Taiwan and drawing the Pacific Fleet in to its defense.

One woman must make the hardest decision of her life in this unforgettably moving story of resistance and faith during one of the darkest times in history. Told from alternating perspectives, While Paris Slept reflects on the power of love, resilience, and courage when all seems lost.

Lifetime friends become bitter enemies when the father of one family is killed by militants - one of whom is a son from the other family. Told in short sections highlighting a rich multiplicity of characters from all walks of life, Homeland brilliantly unfolds in nonlinear fashion as it traces the moral dilemmas faced by the families of murder victim and perpetrator alike. Aramburu alludes only obliquely to the historical context while he focuses on the psychological complexity of his characters and builds nearly unbearable suspense.

Germany, 1943. Rosa Sauer’s parents are gone, and her husband, Gregor, is far away, fighting on the front lines of WWII. Alone, she has little choice but to leave war-torn Berlin behind and live with her in-laws in a village near the Wolfschanze, the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s hidden headquarters. Convinced the enemy wants to poison him, Hitler conscripts 10 women, including Rosa, to be his food tasters. Even though food is a luxury, eating the decadent feasts Hitler will soon be served is an act of torture - after each meal, the women must wait an hour to see if they will die.

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant.