Book picks similar to
Wolfpack 351 by R. Cameron Cooke


military
history
world-war-2-fiction
stand-alone-novel

The Keeper of Secrets


Julie Thomas - 2011
    A family torn apart. A decision that could change everything.Berlin, 1939. Fourteen year old Simon Horowitz is awash in a world of music. His family owns a superb collection of instruments and at its heart is his father's 1742 Guarneri de Gesu violin. But all is lost when the Nazis march across Europe and Simon and his father and brother are sent to Dachau. Amid unimaginable cruelty and death, Simon finds kindness from an unexpected corner, and a chance to pick up a violin again and a chance to live.In the present day, orchestra conductor Rafael Gomez has seen much in his time on the world's stage, but he finds himself oddly inspired by the playing of an aspiring violin virtuoso, a fantastic talent who is only just fourteen. Then the boy, Daniel Horowitz, suddenly refuses to play another note, and Rafael knows he'll do anything he can to change that. When he learns the boy's family once owned a precious violin, believed to have been lost forever, Rafael thinks he might know exactly how to get Daniel playing again. In taking on the task he discovers a family story like no other that winds from World War II and Communist Russia all the way to Rafael's very own stage.

Carolina Skeletons


David Stout - 1988
    Forty-four years later, Bragg's nephew travels to South Carolina to discover the truth--and finds himself on the Wanted List and fighting for his own freedom! HC: Mysterious Press.

Fobbit


David Abrams - 2012
    Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield – where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like an office job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy.Darkly humorous and based on the author's own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war.

Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp


Leonard Berney - 2015
    T.D. is the only book to be published that recounts the events that led up to the British Army’s uncovering of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its 60,000 prisoners, how the Army dealt with the unprecedented horror that existed in the camp, how the surviving prisoners were rescued, how the inmates were evacuated, how the Royal Army Medical Corps established the world’s largest hospital to care for the many thousands of sick and emaciated ex-inmates, how the survivors were rehabilitated and cared for, how they were repatriated to their own countries, why many thousand refused to return ‘home’ and the eventual establishment of the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the largest DP camp in Germany. The author of this book was a senior British Army officer who participated in the liberation of the Camp, who was in charge of evacuating the ex-prisoners to the vast Rehabilitation Camp that the Army set up, and who was then appointed as the Commandant of that Camp until its management was handed over to the United Nations, and who gave evidence against the SS guards at the Belsen War Crimes Trial. Forewords by Nanette Blitz Konig, Belsen survivor and former classmate of Anne Frank, and Major-General Nicholas Eeles CBE, with the introduction by the Oscar®-nominated film director, Joshua Oppenheimer.

The Orphan of Salt Winds


Elizabeth Brooks - 2018
    Ten-year-old Virginia Wrathmell arrives at Salt Winds, a secluded house on the edge of a marsh, to meet her adoptive parents—practical, dependable Clem and glamorous, mercurial Lorna. The marsh, with its deceptive tides, is a beautiful but threatening place. Virginia’s new parents’ marriage is full of secrets and tensions she doesn’t quite understand, and their wealthy neighbor, Max Deering, drops by too often, taking an unwholesome interest in the family’s affairs. Only Clem offers a true sense of home. War feels far away among the birds and shifting sands—until the day a German fighter plane crashes into the marsh, and Clem ventures out to rescue the airman. What happens next sets into motion a crime so devastating it will haunt Virginia for the rest of her life. Seventy-five years later, she finds herself drawn back to the marsh, and to a teenage girl who appears there, nearly frozen and burdened by her own secrets. In her, Virginia might have a chance at retribution and a way to right a grave mistake she made as a child.  Elizabeth Brooks’s gripping debut mirrors its marshy landscape—full of twists and turns and moored in a tangle of family secrets. A gothic, psychological mystery and atmospheric coming-of-age story, The Orphan of Salt Winds is the portrait of a woman haunted by the place she calls home.

Burnt Shadows


Kamila Shamsie - 2009
    As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history--personal and political--are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

Resistance


Anita Shreve - 1995
    Now available in mass market paperback for the first time, this novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author takes readers on an unforgettable journey into a harrowing world where forbidden passions have catastrophic consequences.

The Invisible Bridge


Julie Orringer - 2010
    Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour.

Berlin Embassy


William Russell - 1940
     But what did the German people think of the war? And what had they actually thought about the rise of the Nazi party? William Russell, a young US diplomat who worked in the American Embassy in Berlin, explains in detail his experiences of Germany in the early phases of the war from August 1939 through to April 1940. By asking questions to his friends, colleagues and people who he passed on the streets, Russell uncovered the state of minds of normal Germans, what they were thinking, doing and saying through the course of 1939 and 1940. Drawing evidence from a variety of sources, including newspapers, the radio, recently published books, as well as the jokes and gossip that circulated on the streets of the German capital, Russell is able to demonstrate how not all Germans were card-waving Nazis, but how the vast majority were politically apathetic, nervous of the future and often outwardly critical of the Nazi regime. Russell explains how many Germans laughed at figures such as Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering when they were in privacy of their own houses. Although written in only second year of the war it is clear that Russell and many of his friends are aware of the impending horrors that the war will cause and he tries desperately throughout the book to do his best for those who would suffer the most at the hands of the Nazi regime. Berlin Embassy is the classic account of Germany and its people in the first year of the Second World War. “The small things that happen to the small people- as reported by a man in a small job in the American embassy in Berlin, who managed to get the man in the street to talk frankly.” Kirkus Reviews “Exciting reading … A very fine book.” William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany William Russell was an author and journalist who after completing his education had worked in the Berlin Embassy during 1939 and 1940. After he left Germany he joined the U.S. Army and served two years as an Order of Battle Specialist in the Intelligence Branch in England. He passed away in 2000. His book Berlin Embassy was first published in 1941.

The English Wife


Adrienne Chinn - 2020
    Her charismatic Newfoundlander husband Thomas is still missing in action. Until a letter arrives explaining Thomas is back at home on the other side of the Atlantic recovering from his injuries.Travelling to a distant country to live with a man she barely knows is the bravest thing Ellie has ever had to do. But nothing can prepare her for the harsh realities of her new home…September 11th 2001Sophie Parry is on a plane to New York on the most tragic day in the city’s history. While the world watches the news in horror, Sophie’s flight is rerouted to a tiny town in Newfoundland and she is forced to seek refuge with her estranged aunt Ellie. Determined to discover what it was that forced her family apart all those years ago, newfound secrets may change her life forever…

We Escaped: A Family's Flight from Holland During WWII


Alexander H. ter Weele - 2015
    seasoned with the terror of war. We Escaped plunges the reader into the extraordinary World War II escapades of an ordinary couple and their children as they first escape from Nazi-occupied Holland; and then deal with the war years by leavening danger and stress with the joy and love of everyday family life. It is the song and dance of The Sound of Music seasoned with the terror of guns and blood. The story begins in the Netherlands, a peaceful nation protected by a treaty of neutrality and kinship with Hitler's Germany. The calm is shattered by the cacophony and confusion of battle as, under the guns of panzers, German troops overrun Holland's lines. The ter Weele family's subsequent exodus from their home is told from the points of view of the father, Lieutenant Carl ter Weele, a Dutch reservist called up to defend the Grebbeberg; his wife Margery, an American citizen raised in Boston, who delivers her third child in a hospital not far from the Grebbeberg as war threatens; their oldest son, six-year-old Jan, whose dark eyes and hair lead Nazis to suspect he is Jewish; and their second son, Alex, a blond and fair-skinned imp, who at the age of two charms a German border guard into allowing the family to cross into Switzerland. Within weeks of Germany's conquest of Holland, the family has to flee the dragnet of the Gestapo, which is arresting all Dutch military officers. As far as Carl can see, the only way out is through Germany, and from there it's a tortuous and terrifying journey through Switzerland, Vichy France, Spain, and Portugal, with the Gestapo a threat at every turn.

Fields of the Fatherless


Elaine Marie Cooper - 2013
    Although frightened, eighteen-year-old Betsy Russell (an ancestor to actor Kurt Russell) of Menotomy Village, Massachusetts, wants to be prepared in case of attack by British troops. Her father, prosperous farmer Jason, is the fourth generation of Russells on this land yet their very rights as British Colonials are being stripped away one by one. Will the King of England take their land as well? Tensions are growing here in the countryside west of Boston and the outbreak of battle seems a certainty. Jason desperately wants to protect his family his wife, children and grandchildren and their future. Betsy makes every attempt to be prepared for the worst. But not even the American militia could have predicted the bloody massacre that was about to occur right on the Russells' doorstep. If Betsy loses everything she holds dear, are the rights of all the Colonists endangered? Fields of the Fatherless is based on a true story.

Fred's Funeral


Sandy Day - 2017
    Based on a true story. Fred Sadler has just died of old age. It’s 1986, seventy years after he marched off to war, and his ghost hovers near the ceiling of the dismal nursing home. To Fred’s dismay, the arrangement of his funeral falls to his prudish and disparaging sister-in-law. As Viola dominates the remembrance of Fred, his ghost agonizes over his inability to set the record straight. Was old Uncle Fred really suffering from shell shock? Why was he shut away for most of his life in the Whitby Hospital for the Insane? Why didn't his family help him more? Fred’s memories of his life as a child, his family’s hotel, the War, and the mental hospital, clash with Viola’s version of events as the family gathers on a rainy October night to pay their respects. Discover for yourself why reviewers are loving Fred's Funeral. Buy your copy today.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West


Cormac McCarthy - 1985
    Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

The Boy Who Went Away


Eli Gottlieb - 1997
    While engaging in his favorite domestic spying game, Denny unwittingly discovers the desperate measures his mother will take to save his autistic older brother, Fad, who is lost in the diagnostic Dark Ages of the 1960s. At the heart of this novel is not only the story of Denny's coltish entrance to adolescence, but also that of his relationship with Fad, which will be forever changed during the course of that summer at 44 Drainer Drive. This is the cruelly antic, heartrending story of two childhoods that would, by fall's arrival, be irretrievably lost.