Literary Fiction War

Mallory, Miller and Andrea are united into a lethally effective team. Their mission: to silence the impregnable guns set in the tall cliffs of Navarone. On their success or failure rests one of the most critical offensives of the Second World War.

It is September 8, 1943, and 14-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful.

Set in Vienna from 1910 to 1946, All of You Every Single One is an atmospheric, original, and deeply moving novel about family, freedom, and how true love might survive impossible odds. Julia Lindqvist, a woman unhappily married to a famous Swedish playwright, leaves her husband to begin a passionate affair with a female tailor named Eve. The pair run away together and settle in the more liberal haven of Vienna, where they fall in love, navigate the challenges of their newfound independence, and find community in the city’s Jewish quarter.

In 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, goes to occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparently simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action.

Japanese-occupied Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's children are in terrible danger. Her eldest child Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Jasmin, the youngest, lives confined in a basement for her own safety. And her son, Abel, has disappeared without a trace. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.

India, 1940. And Rosie is devastated by the sudden death of her beloved mother. The parties, smiles, and games disappear, and although Rosie is desperate to stay in her home, her father cannot look after her. All alone in the world, she is sent to Sri Lanka to live with her mother’s friend Silvia and her three sons. Time passes, and Rosie flourishes in her new home amongst the mango trees and canna lilies. And one day, under the heat of the Sri Lankan sun, she falls in love for the first time. But her happiness is short lived, for the brutal war is creeping closer.

In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, 'Whom would you like to meet?' He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and would meet many times, talking for hours and together unravelling the story of Onoda's long war.

MI6's Head of Station in Turkey is killed in a mysterious plane crash. Amelia Levene, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, wants the incident investigated - quickly and quietly. The only man she can trust is Thomas Kell, a disgraced spy searching for redemption. Arriving in Istanbul, Kell discovers that MI6 operations in the region have been fatally compromised: a traitor inside Western Intelligence threatens not just the Special Relationship, but the security of the entire Middle East.

The terrors of a young soldier come to life in shocking, almost hallucinatory detail in a powerful first novel that follows in the footsteps of The Red Badge of Courage and Farewell to Arms.

Mildred Groves, an unusual young woman gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future, goes to work in a top-secret research facility during WWII, only to be tormented by visions of what the mission will mean for humankind.

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners, three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy.

Considered to be one of Virginia Woolf's most popular novels, Mrs. Dalloway follows one high-society woman as she goes about her day planning a splendid party for her acquaintances. As she goes about her day, she ponders on the life she could be living had she not married the reliable Richard Dalloway and instead sought the enigmatic Peter Walsh. At one point, she muses on the fact that she had not the option to be with a close female friend of hers. The novel then takes a turn to follow Septimus Smith, First World War veteran plagued with deferred traumatic stress.

Hong Kong, 1941. Following the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the wealthy Tang family flee to Hong Kong, believing it to be protected under British occupation. As the First Wife of the family, Mingzhu leads a sheltered - if lonely - existence overseeing her daughter Qiang's education, resisting the hostility of her husband's concubine, while managing the household alongside her devoted maid, Biyu.

Louis Thorn and Haruto "Harry" Yamada - Eagle and Crane - are the star attractions of Earl Shaw's Flying Circus, a daredevil (and not exactly legal) flying act that traverses Depression-era California. The young men have a complicated relationship, thanks to the Thorn family's belief that the Yamadas - Japanese immigrants - stole land that should have stayed in the Thorn family.

Hatred of the enemy consumes Michael during a long and dusty march to Gettysburg. Michael's only desire is to kill as many of the enemy as he can so he can go home. He coldly counts off the rebels that fall to his bullets until he is brought up short by a dying man holding up his Bible. He was a brother in Christ, Michael realizes after the man dies, and "I had hated him with cruel hatred.'' When Michael returns home from the war, his wife sees a man still lost in the horrors of battle.

A thrilling tale and powerful love story that tells the heroic and tragic true story of the German resistance in World War II. When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they must flee the country. Dora, passionate and fearless, her lover, the great playwright Ernst Toller, her younger cousin Ruth and Ruth's husband, Hans, find refuge in London.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can’t put in perspective. And then the world explodes.

Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between Brian Botsford, an upper-class young English writer, and Edward Phelan, an idealistic employee of the London Underground and member of the Communist Party. Though far better educated than Edward, Brian is also far more callow, convinced that his homosexuality is something he will outgrow. Edward, on the other hand, possesses “an unproblematic capacity to accept” both Brian and the unorthodox nature of their love for each other.

Ellie is a sweet-natured brunette, generous of heart with a sparkling smile and an accent that reveals her East End background. Bonny is beautiful and spoilt, with cascades of blond hair, the brightest pair of blue eyes and a mouth like Cupid's bow. The two girls meet in London at the end of the war when, seduced and abandoned by two American airmen, they pool their wits and resources and set off to make a living on the stage.

"Masterful...a classic parable of the human condition," said Publishers Weekly about Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets, and the same can be said about Canin's brilliant new novel. Breathtaking in its suspense and beauty, Carry Me Across the Water tells the story of a complex man's extraordinary life, lived against the backdrop of the central years of the twentieth century.